Religious Diversity in Kingston, Ontario: “Is There Any?’
Our Diverse Cities (Summer, 2006): 56-60.
William Closson James, Department of Religious Studies, Queen’s University

A generation ago, people used to talk as if religion would die away, or at least become superfluous, as Canada became more secular. Instead, personal spirituality, a multihued religious pluralism, and new issues about religion and public policy have emerged as notable features of a transformed religious situation. The nature and extent of religious diversity in multicultural Canada has firmly impressed itself on many observers, even as religion has often been relegated to consideration as a subset of some other aspect of “culture.” While this transformed religious scene has mostly been examined in Canada’s large urban centres, it is happening in smaller cities too where it has not been much studied to this point.

Only nine cities in Canada have a population of more than a half-million people. But the next twenty cities range in size from 500,000 down to 100,000 people. Though we almost never use such terminology, is this where “middle Canada” is to be found? When compared with Canada at large, Kingston (pop. 146,838) mirrors the national distribution of population by age, but with fewer immigrants, a larger proportion of highly educated people, and more employment in health and social services and in education. In the popular view Kingston epitomizes Upper Canada’s Anglo-Celtic customs and values. Kingston is “an institutional town” that has changed little over the past 300 years. How do these factors show up in religion? What does religion look like in the city’s university, military, hospitals, and prisons, and how do these institutions affect religion in the city generally? Has increased ethnic and religious diversity of the past generation altered the traditions of religious sites and groups within this mostly unilingual city (see James and Gashinski 2006)?

Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Religious Diversity in Kingston, now beginning its fourth year, has been attempting a total mapping of all aspects of religion in the city, particularly in three areas. First, we study the groups and record the activities present at various religious sites representative of major world religions. The visible monuments of downtown ecclesiastical architecture, many originating from the 19th century, represent “mainline” Christian denominations: Roman Catholic, Anglican, United, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Baptist. Several dozen more buildings throughout the larger city house “non-mainline” groups, mostly having some connection with Christianity: Brethren, Pentecostal, Salvation Army, Christian Reformed, Unitarian, Free Methodist, Seventh-day Adventist, Missionary Alliance, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. Some Christians assemble to worship on the basis of shared ethnicity: the Chinese Alliance, Greek Orthodox, Ukrainian Catholic, Coptic Christian, or South Indian churches; additionally, there are Korean, francophone Roman Catholic, and Dutch congregations. For almost a century there has been an orthodox synagogue in Kingston, while a reform congregation with its own rabbi has become established in the last generation. In the last decade an Islamic Centre was built in the suburban area north of Highway 401, while the Kuluta Buddhist Centre has just moved to renovated space downtown.

The second objective of Religious Diversity in Kingston is to map the alternative religions present in Kingston, most of which lack dedicated space for their uses. Many groups in Kingston use temporary space, members’ homes, or meet infrequently, such as Spiritualists, Bahá’í, Hindus, Wiccans, Rosicrucians, Sri Chinmoy, Sai Baba, and other New Religious Movements (NRMs). As well, people assemble for meditation, Tai Chi, Yoga, or come together for personal growth or consciousness-raising in response to ads placed in a public library, a bookstore, or a health food store. Students on the campus of Queen’s University gather for meetings of Navigators, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, the Newman, Geneva, or Hillel houses, or for special lectures sponsored by Transcendental Meditation, the Raelians, Krishna Consciousness, or Soka Gakkai International. In addition, religious activities, including services provided by institutional chaplains, take place in schools, hospitals, and prisons, at the Royal Military College, at the Spirituality Centre run by the Sisters of Providence, and on the armed forces base. All these deserve a place in the account of the religious variety to be found in Kingston. Among the issues being explored are the shifts that have taken place over the past decade or so as more such options increase and attendance at some long-established worship sites decreases. How have the changing roles of women in society, or an aging population, or the generation of baby boomers affected religious groups?

To gauge the manner and extent of religion’s departure from the public sphere to become resituated in the private self is the project’s third objective. Recent trends, confirmed by a Statistics Canada report, indicate that religious life and practice are marked by an increased personal spirituality (see Valpy 2006). If so, how have extant religious traditions adapted to this less social or communitarian and more personalistic and individualistic turn? Perhaps an eclectic multilayered spirituality, in which people “mix and match” several different modes of religiousness, alters a previously exclusive commitment or loyalty to a single tradition (see James 2006). Or, substitute forms of religion might supplement, but without replacing, that ongoing religious commitment. Yet, even as more personal spirituality becomes evident, another perhaps unexpected phenomenon is occurring too as religions become engaged in the public sphere, raising policy issues for municipalities (James and Gashinski 2006).

Each year the Religious Diversity in Kingston project employs three or four student researchers. When one of them, an MA student from Toronto, told her father what she was doing, he queried: “Religious diversity in Kingston? Is there any?” And, in some ways, that is an excellent, challenging question to raise. The Statistics Canada census data from 2001 show that about 12% of Kingston’s population is foreign-born, as contrasted with Toronto’s 44%. Visible minorities in Kingston comprise less than 5% of the city’s population (6,735 out of 142,770), whereas in the Province of Ontario as a whole visible minorities amount to almost 20%, and in Toronto about 37%. (Note: Data for Kingston, as for other cities, may be found on the Statistics Canada website for the 2001 Census at http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/home/index.cfm. Search under “Community Profiles.”) In Kingston, then, there are not many people who are, to use the language by which Statistics Canada defines visible minorities, “non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.” “Religious diversity,” rather than referring specifically to a diversity of religions, tends to be understood as an aspect of this kind of ethnocultural diversity, one of the results of diversified immigration (see Germain 2004). But when a religion is more or less inseparable from other aspects of cultural practice, it might not be studied or reported very much at all. The largest visible minority group in Kingston consists of the Chinese, but their “religion” remains largely invisible (or unreported, as almost 60% identify themselves as having “no religion”) to census-takers, and to the general public (see Lai, Paper, and Paper 2005).

Frequently the standard of whether a particular place counts as fully diverse or representatively multicultural gets measured against the examples of Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver (see, e.g., Derouin 2004). These three cities were the destination of more than 70% of the immigrants who came to Canada during the 1990s (Justus 2004). Recent immigrants—in fact, 90% of them—have preferred to live in a metropolitan area. But Kingston ought not to be compared with these three great metropolises, or even with such larger centres as Ottawa-Hull, Calgary, Edmonton, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Kitchener-Waterloo, Windsor, or London, all of which have about 20% of their population foreign-born. Many more properly comparable cities such as Saskatoon, Regina, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Saint John, Sherbrooke, Quebec, etc. have a lower proportion of foreign-born inhabitants than Kingston’s 12.4%. An exception is Abbotsford, BC, roughly the same size as Kingston, but where 22% are foreign-born. Notably, 80% of the immigrants to Abbotsford in the 1990s were Asian, with about 60% of the arrivals in that decade having been born in India, a phenomenon described as a continuation of “a longstanding pattern of South Asian settlement in that region” (Justus 2004). Does such a large number of recent immigrants from one part of the world living in a small Canadian city necessarily contribute to a full range of multicultural variety?

What, then, of religious diversity as such considered apart from country of origin, ethnicity, or the representation of visible minorities? About 77% of Kingstonians are either Protestants or Roman Catholics; in Toronto these two major Christian groups amount to 58% of the city’s population. And, whereas Jews and Muslims, each group having less than a thousand adherents reported, together add up to just 1.2% of Kingston’s population, in Toronto they are 15% of the whole. Kingston has only 475 Buddhists, 465 Hindus, and 130 Sikhs—again, an under-representation as contrasted with Toronto. The only dedicated space for any one of these three groups in Kingston is the Kuluta Buddhist Centre, part of the Kadampa tradition, consisting mostly of western followers of this adaptation of a branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The majority of the practitioners are not of Asian descent, nor is their ancestral religious tradition usually Buddhist. While the Kuluta Buddhist Centre adds to the religious diversity of Kingston, its members and adherents probably reflect the ethnic makeup of the city of Kingston. So, the question remains: Is there any? Religious diversity in Kingston, that is. And what constitutes religious diversity?

Intrinsic religious diversity within a single group might be more prevalent within congregations in small- and medium-sized cities in Canada than in larger metropolises. Kingston’s Muslims are a case in point. The Kingston Islamic Centre is not a “mosque,” and is currently searching, after more than a decade of existence, for its first imam. As its website makes clear, this Centre “is for the benefit of all Muslims.” The Muslim community is Kingston is comprised of Sunnis and Shi’ites, and some Ismailis, all representing various countries of origin and speaking different languages. Because of their small numbers (less than a thousand) they must stress, amidst their own diversity, a central Islamic unity that they share in common. No group could afford to go its own way. Meanwhile, on the Queen’s University campus, as many as a half-dozen different Muslim groups exist for students, the large majority of whom come from outside Kingston, who want to continue the specifics of their own practice of Islam while at university.

Hindus in Kingston present a parallel case. Of perhaps 150 families in Kingston with origins in India, about 100 families are Hindu. (The others are Muslim or Sikh or Parsi or Christian.) Some of Kingston’s Hindus are from countries other than India, such as Burma, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Guyana, Fiji, and Sri Lanka. One longstanding member of this community, asked about the possibility of having a temple for Hindus in Kingston, replied that such a measure would create divisions and factions, especially once a leader was brought in who might have specific ideas about deities and worship practices not widely shared in Kingston. Meanwhile, Hindus in Kingston wanting specific rites travel to Toronto to visit a temple there, or bring in a priest from elsewhere for special occasions (Personal Interview, 11 July 2005).

The present situation of meeting informally in people’s homes has been in place for several decades, requiring flexibility and adaptation. In India Vaishnavas would not normally have anything to do with another sect, such as Saivites, that did not have Vishnu as its main deity. The person we interviewed pointed out that “in India they could do that, but it’s impossible to practise that same thing over here.” Some of the Hindu families in Kingston who are used to silent meditation might disagree with the singing of hymns when the group meets. Yet, part of the customary devotions of the majority includes the singing of a hymn: “And when we sing it, we are singing it all together and it’s kind of loud, with all those bells and everything, because we are actually pretending that we are waking up the deities. We are invoking their presence into us” (Personal Interview, 11 July 2005).

If one looks for ethnic (rather than theological or doctrinal) diversity within Christianity, that too exists in Kingston, and includes some congregations comprised chiefly of visible minority members. Kingston has two predominantly Afro-Canadian Christian congregations, Faith Alive, a house church that has been in the city for some time, and the Church of Pentecost which for several years had a mission in rented space at the municipal Portsmouth Olympic Harbour. The website for the Ghana-based Church of Pentecost (www.pentecost.ca) continues to list Kingston as a branch assembly with two services held every Sunday, with contact information, but without its current location being specified. A Korean congregation uses space within a Free Methodist church, and a Chinese Missionary Alliance church has its own building. About thirty Egyptian families support the Coptic Church that rents two adjacent store spaces in a suburban strip mall. If one includes the religious diversity brought to the city over the years by European immigrants, the list can be extended. The Greek Orthodox Church has a prominent building downtown across from the Public Library. The Roman Catholic Church in Kingston has Portuguese, Polish, and French congregations. There is a small Ukrainian Catholic Church, and one of the two Christian Reformed congregations continues to be the church home of many Protestants of Dutch background. And, of course, those of German descent from an earlier wave of immigration are to be found in the local Lutheran church. Such a list reveals far greater diversity within Christianity than one might have expected 150 years ago, when perhaps the greatest religious division imaginable was between Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Catholics.

Perhaps it is not surprising that a liberal Protestant minister might have more in common with, say, a Reform rabbi than with a theologically conservative member of the same church. Both clergy might be willing, for instance, to conduct same-sex marriages, a practice that some—even many—of their own congregants might disapprove of. What is being suggested here for consideration, then, is that religious identity and community may be based on other factors than ethnicity. Religious diversity can exist within a single religious tradition or denomination--or even within a single congregation--and not simply among faith traditions explicitly differing from one another. A distinction could be made, along these lines, between extrinsic and intrinsic religious diversity.

One United Church minister interviewed for this research project commented that issues to do with sex (celibacy, contraception, sexual orientation, and gender) have become the test of orthodoxy within Christianity. He continued, pointing out other aspects of this intrinsic diversity: “The greatest difference, in the church, and I think also in the world today, is not between people who believe different things, but between people who believe in the same things, but believe in them differently.” He explained: “I can be much closer with a Muslim, with a Jew, with a Buddhist, than some of my own people who look at the Bible differently, who look at Jesus differently, who don’t recognize that maybe … God is blessing the distinctiveness in religions” (Personal Interview, 3 October 2003).
In the context of Kingston, as in most of the rest of Canada, one of the great challenges is to appreciate that distinctiveness while creating, amidst the existence of diversity, a positive form of religious pluralism (see, e.g., Eck 2004; Biles and Ibrahim 2005). One of the expressions of such pluralism (we are still researching this possibility), perhaps more attainable in a small city than a large one, are the comprehensively inclusive multifaith events that seem to be increasing in Kingston. The question about Kingston’s religious diversity--“Is there any?”—can be qualified and finally affirmed, and, when answered in full, taken further to show that possibilities of achieving various kinds of rapprochement amidst diverse groups are also evident.

Bibliography

 Biles, John and Humera Ibrahim. “Religious Diversity in Canada: In the Shadow of Christian Privilege.” Canadian Diversité Canadienne (Fall 2005), 67-70.
 Derouin, Jodey Michael. “Asians and Multiculturalism in Canada’s Three Major Cities: Some Evidence from the Ethnic Diversity Survey.” Our Diverse Cities (Number 1, Spring 2004), 58-62.
 Eck , Diana L. A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco: Harper, 2004.
 Germain, Annick. “Religious Diversity: A Problem for Municipalities?” Our Diverse Cities (Number 1, Spring 2004), 143-44.
 James, William Closson. “Dimorphs and Cobblers: Ways of Being Religious in Canada.” In Religion and Canadian Society: Traditions, Transitions, and Innovations, 119-31. Edited by Lori G. Beaman. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2006.
 James, William Closson and Laurie K. Gashinski. “The Challenges of Religious Pluralism in Kingston, Ontario.” The Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15/2 (2006): 50-66.
 Justus, Martha. “Immigrants in Canada’s Cities.” Our Diverse Cities (Number 1, Spring 2004), 41-47.
 Lai, David Chuenyan, Jordan Paper, and Li Chuang Paper. “The Chinese in Canada: Their Unrecognized Religion.” In Religion and Ethnicity in Canada, 89-110. Edited by Paul Bramadat and David Seljak. Toronto: Pearson, 2005.
 Valpy, Michael. “Canadians praying in private, Statscan says.” The Globe and Mail, 3 May 2006, A3.