PANEL PRESENTATION
A panel presentation on Religious Diversity in Kingston by Laurie K. Gashinski for the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion meeting at York University on 30 May 2006. The panel, Religious Diversity in the City, dealt with projects on religious diversity currently underway in Halifax, Kingston, and Ottawa.
RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY IN THE CITY
“ Religious Diversity” or “pluralism” projects, focusing on relatively small and dense populations such as a single city, offer a new direction in religious studies. While generating a thick description of a religious landscape, such projects also serve civic goals by offering the general public a comprehensive picture of the religious landscape of a city and helping policy-makers develop better programmes and services for the full range of citizens they serve.
This panel brings together representatives of three Diversity Projects: Kingston, Ontario, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Ottawa, Ontario. All of the projects presented by panelists are all intended to generate base-line data on religious communities, yet each offers its own perspective, methodology, and emphasis. These differences reflect the communities being studied, theoretical interests of the researchers, and constraints imposed by institutional policies and funding. In addition to summarizing the state of work in their projects, discussants will address research methods, compilation and dissemination of results (public and academic), and public policy applications of their work.
Participants:
Panel Chair: Paul Bramadat, co-editor (with David Seljak) of Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada.
Presenters:
Paul Bowlby (Halifax)
Laurie Gashinski (Kingston)
David E. Armstrong (Ottawa)
Abstract: The ongoing Religious Diversity in Kingston Project examines continuities and discontinuities within historic religious traditions, and the creation of alternate traditions – all focused within the context of a small city in central Canada. What religious practices are taking place in Kingston’s universities, hospitals and prisons, and how do these institutions generally affect religion in the city? Has increased ethnic and religious diversity of the past generation altered the traditions of religious sites and groups within this predominantly unilingual city? Has religion departed from the public sphere for the inner self as is often supposed? This paper will examine the methodologies and challenges as we work to answer these questions and map over one hundred religious sites in Kingston. Some early findings are shared.
Religious diversity projects are the quintessential poster child for "the project that may never end." Questions beget new questions, interviews open new cans of worms, and contacts made generate new leads. Mapping a continually evolving religious landscape shaped by a multitude of factors is a tricky business and diversity projects can be difficult to reign in. In an interview with the Kingston Whig-Standard in 2003, Professor William C. James, head of the Religious Diversity in Kingston Project, stated: "I feel exhausted just talking about it" when he was asked about tackling approximately 100 religious sites as part of the then fledging SSHRC funded RDK project.
"Keep your eye on the prize" are wise words to follow when undertaking a task as multifaceted as a diversity project; clear goals and a realistic plan help keep us on track. In our case, the RDK project aims to examine a multitude of religious groups and activities taking place within the City by Kingston stemming from major world religions and minority religious groups. Through site visits, interviews, and case-by-case related background research, a clearer portrait of Kingston's religious world is being painted. The RDK project also examines local religious trends in relation to those of other mid-sized Canadian cities, as well as at provincial and national levels, by making use of Statistics Canada Census data. Furthermore, the RDK project has expanded into the sphere of the privately religious: investigating the shift from institutionalized religiosity to private spirituality; the mix and match approach of tailoring one's own way of being religious; conversion experiences; and what affect, if any, private religion is having on established religious traditions as they attempt to adapt to Canada's contemporary religious situation.
Through its endeavours, the RDK project hopes to serve the academic community and the broader public, including Kingston's religious groups themselves, to help each of us better understand the religious diversity that exists in our own backyard and to show how Kingston may act as an exemplar of religious life in mid-sized Canadian cities. In order to best meet this goal, a system needs to be put in place for fear that one may lose oneself in mountains of newspaper clippings, files crammed in drawers, and towers of teetering interview tapes. To avoid potential stress from the impending chaos it pays to have a method to the madness. Over the next 15 minutes or so, I will share with you some of the method and the madness of the RDK world.
First, I would like to comment on the project's methodology and some snags we have encountered. The earliest stages of the RDK project consisted of: receiving Ethics board approval; affiliating RDK with Harvard's Pluralism Project; surveying Kingston's religious landscape; the creation of a filing system; the development of the RDK website; and formulating a template for the interviews.
In regards to Ethics Board approval, the RDK application was expedited after providing the board with the necessary documentation in order to conduct interviews. While its purpose is respected, ethics approvals effectively places limitations upon academic research in a manner not found in the world of independent journalism and research, especially in regards to working with aboriginal peoples, the mentally ill, and children. It takes some creative maneuvering in order to garner first hand information about the religious practices of the aforementioned groups without overstepping prescribed boundaries.
For example, in the case of Native Spirituality, we kept our research "in house" by interviewing Queen's University's resident Elder at the Four Directions Native Students' Centre. For psychiatric inpatient research, I spent Tuesday afternoons attending church services at the Kingston Psychiatric Hospital after obtaining permission from the hospital administration. Unable to directly interview the patients, I formally interviewed the priest and pastoral visitor, and observed and intermingled with the residents, in order to gain a better understanding of the role church services play in their lives, and how these services exemplify and deviate from standard church services. I don't mind adding that I learned just as much about myself during those two months as I did about my subject matter. Ethic boards also require incidence reports to be submitted in the event that an occurrence takes place contrary to the confines of the approval granted; understandably, a lost interview tape can result in tedious paperwork and subsequent follow-up by the ethics board to ensure that the infraction be prevented from reoccurring.
Don't reinvent the wheel; just tamper with it a little bit. In RDK's case, the project is loosely based upon and affiliated with Harvard's Pluralism Project, a project now 15 years in the making. The American-based Pluralism Project has provided RDK with valuable insights. We have benefited from the Pluralism Project's guidelines for research, and have modified the Pluralism Project's research template and research questions to suit our own group profiling and interviewing needs.
In addition, their website inspired the creation of RDK's own site, a tool which lends credibility to the project and can act as a reference for potential interviewees who prefer to research us before we research them. Like the Pluralism Project, one can go to RDK's website to find the project's goals, staff profiles, interview questions, and links to similar projects and related articles. Moreover, the website is a valuable tool as RDK shares its findings with the public and our peers. By looking at the work of those who have "gone before" we can ascertain what works, what doesn't, and how we can apply and adapt others' methods for our own purposes. Learning from and sharing with one another is the purpose for discussions such as this, and in this vein perhaps our projects can serve as templates for other researchers heading up similar ventures in Canada.
Even with frameworks available, cobbling together one's own research path can be difficult and often occurs through a process of trial and error. For instance, creating a filing system for over 100 religious sites from scratch is quite in an undertaking, involving the storage and organization of original and dubbed tapes, hardcopy materials from site visits, videotapes and DVDs, transcripts, newspaper clippings, and resources for background research. For the RDK project, we have employed a colour-coded, alphabetical, and numerically ordered system to organize our filing cabinets, stacked shelving units, storage boxes, computer files, and detailed religious sites map that hangs in the office adorned with a rainbow of pushpins, all streamlined and cross-referenced with one another to avoid confusion and to catch any potential oversights.
As I imagine is the case in Halifax and Ottawa, we are the first to attempt to map out the religious landscape of our respective areas, effectively making us pioneers in our own little corners of the world. Therefore, decisions regarding the depth and breadth of the project, and its archival character, to be made in order to satisfy the stated goals within the allotted timeframe and budget —a balancing act to be sure! Before getting down to the nitty-gritty of fieldwork, the RDK project staff need to decide where to focus its efforts, first through geographical boundaries by omitting religious sites on Kingston's outskirts, such as the islands and small neighbouring communities. This decision is not without its drawbacks; other than census data provided by StatsCan, little if any qualitative research has been documented regarding the trends of religious life in towns such as Sunbury, Westport, Gananoque, and the islands, and whether or not these communities are mirroring changes seen in Kingston remains to be studied.
It was also decided that RDK would first focus on the downtown core and move out towards the suburbs, following the urban development and settlement patterns of the City. This decision has effectively traced the religious development of Kingston along historical and geographical lines and has proved valuable in locating current religious trends, evaluating changing architectural styles, and explaining the hardships encountered by historic mainstream churches in the cities downtown core.
Choosing a medium for recording interviews was also a tricky decision. As technology advances so rapidly, who is to tell which medium will be most accessible in the future? Conducting interviews has proven to be a time-sucking task. First it must be decided which groups should be interviewed. This process was made easier by consulting the Kingston's Yellow Pages; the Information Kingston website, and the Religion sections of community newspapers. However, these sources fail to mention a number of smaller religious groups and subgroups, groups that meet informally, groups that cannot afford to pay for listings, groups on the periphery of the religious mainstream such as tarot readers and dowsers, new groups which missed the listing deadline, and all that is privately religious. Groups within these categories had to be found by digging a little further into the undercurrents of Kingston's religious landscape. We put on our sleuth hats and combed the alleys so to speak.
Once a preliminary list was decided upon, a blown-up map was created, a number and colour filing system was put into place, and preliminary site visits Ð complete with visual documentation Ð commenced in order to compile profiles of Kingston's religious sites. Pamphlets designed to advertise the program were distributed to a wide variety of religious institutions and public venue thereby reducing the number of cold-calls made hoping to increase the receptivity of potential interviewees.
From start to finish, the interview process looks much like this: choose the group, identify the contact person, contact the individual, make a pitch, book an interview, conduct a site visit, take pictures, create a profile, do background research, tailor an interview based upon a prepared template, conduct, transcribe, summarize, cross-reference and index the interview, then file it away with the future intent of keeping the file active and up to date through follow-ups and periodic schmoozing. From start to finish, the process may take a good 15-20 hours of research time. Multiply that by 100 religious sites and you are looking at a substantial portion of your funding dollars! From my end of the bargain I can only hope that Dr. James feels like he is getting the most bang for his buck!
Now that the interviews are drawing to an end and the arduous task of summarizing and indexing is nearing completion, a thematic approach is being employed to identify issues which seem to reoccur across Kingston's religious spectrum. The RDK project is not working with surveys and translating our finding into percentages, a method which can lack depth and may be misleading as they tend to miss the nuances behind the hows and whys of an individual's religious identification, practice and choices. Of course, this is not to say that quantitative analysis does not offer valuable information for researchers and policy creators, nor that they are wholly impersonal and without merit. Neither does it imply that qualitative methodology is not without flaws.
But diversity projects such as RDK flesh out dry statistics by investigating the goings-on in Kingston in a manner which takes the city's geographical, historical, and social contexts into account, along with the highly personal nature of that which is religious. Through our efforts we are now beginning to paint a more accurate portrait of a Kingston that looks more religiously diverse than statistics alone would imply; we are putting some flesh on the statistical bones if you will.
A quick story serves as a case in point. In the early days of the Religious Diversity in Kingston Project, a father of a research assistant quipped, "Religious diversity in Kingston? Is there any?" On the surface, his comment is not ill-founded. According to 2001 Census data, Kingston is predominately Christian, with Roman Catholics leading the pack at approximately 30 percent, United at 17 percent, and Anglican at 13 percent. Muslims and Jews each comprise less than 1 percent of the population, 18 percent check off "no religious affiliation" on census forms, and the remainder is dominated by individuals belonging to non-mainstream Protestant denominations. On the statistical side, Kingston does not look very diverse; it is basically Christian with a few other faiths thrown in for good measure. For the father of the research assistant, Kingston, with its rate of immigration slightly lower than other Canadian urban centres, does indeed look quite homogenous.
But religious plurality is alive and well in Kingston, with a number of new religious groups establishing themselves within the community, thereby increasing the level of intrinsic and extrinsic religious diversity. Kingston's Catholic community offers us an example of intrinsic diversity. While census data shows that nearly one third of Kingstonians identify as Catholics, it does not highlight the nuances of the City's Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, Chinese, French, and Portuguese Roman Catholic, and Greek and Russian Orthodox and Coptic Christian communities. Furthermore, Kingston is now home to an ever-increasing number of non-mainstream protestant churches, a trend occurring across Canada, thereby expanding the number of ways one can identify as a Christian. Not at all homogenous, Kingston's Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist communities are also intrinsically diverse. The local Islamic Centre reflects the incredible diversity of Kingston's growing Muslim population which includes everyone from newly arrived immigrants to newly converted Westerners, individuals from both Shi'ite and Sunni traditions, and Muslims of various ethnic, cultural, political, national, and linguistic backgrounds. Likewise, a Buddhist Centre rooted in the Mahayana tradition, a Zen Meditation group, a Soka Gakkai International Group, and a School of Tai chi and Esoteric Arts, reflect Kingston's diverse Buddhist community. Kingston is also home to: two Jewish synagogues, Baha'is and Unitarians; at least two Native Friendship centres; organized and practicing wiccan groups; a Chinese Alliance church; Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, a sizeable Mormon community; a Rosicrucian teaching group, Dowsers, Reiki Masters, a woman who can help you identify your guardian angels, and a handful of very radical and outspoken nuns who are actively involved in social justice issues and matters of deep ecology. Religious Diversity in Kingston? Indeed.
This lengthy list illustrates that religious pluralism is neither synonymous with multiculturalism, nor that religious diversity is to remain confined within the borders of Canada's 9 largest cities whose populations exceed 500,000 residents. The diversification of religious affiliation, identification, and practice is taking place within and outside of traditional religious boundaries, and is broadened, but not defined, along ethnic, linguistic, and cultural lines. And perhaps by looking at Kingston within its geographical, historical, and social context, we can come to see how a smaller city poses unique challenges for its religious communities and how it mirrors or differs from other cities and trends across Canada.
Unlike larger cities, Kingston's population and geographic boundaries are small enough to allow for considerable study of its breadth and depth in a manageable manner that places significance on individuals stories as those of religious communities. The net can be thrown wide in Kingston, and our bountiful catch provides us with data that conveys ways in which Kingston's religious diversity typifies that of Canadian mid-sized cities, and the uniqueness of religious life within Kingston and other smaller urban centres. While not as diverse as the Greater Toronto Area, Montreal, or Vancouver, Kingston is more diverse than its smaller neighbouring communities, yet it should be stressed that intrinsic religious diversity within these towns and Kingston's neighbouring rural areas is also evident. It should come to no surprise that larger capital cities are more diverse, their populations are generally larger, and cities have always attracted a broad spectrum of society. Larger numbers overall equate into connection and collaboration with those of similar backgrounds, religious or otherwise.
Smaller religious communities in Kingston have yet to obtain a membership of critical mass, resulting in unique challenges for its religious minorities. Some groups cannot, or choose not, to create separate religious institutions based on ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and even religious lines. As stated earlier, the Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist communities are not homogenous. Yet Kingston's size compels individuals who may not have joined ranks otherwise, to work together in order to establish their communities. At less than 1 percent of the population for each religious group, Kingston's Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu communities are cases in point. The Islamic Society of Kingston serves Muslims from a variety of ethnic, national, and linguistic backgrounds from both the Shi'ite and Sunni traditions. Kingston's Beth Israel Synagogue is predominantly a Conservative congregation, yet has decided to organize as Orthodox in order to meet the requirements for Kingston's Orthodox Jewish community (a minority within a minority), while the Reform Jewish community operates without a building of its own, opting to hold Sabbath services in a Queen's University meeting room, High Holiday services in the Public Library, and its Sunday school at a Kingston community centre. Likewise, members of Kingston's small Hindu community have opted to forgo the establishment of a temple, preferring to meet in each other's homes. Could it be that smaller cities, with their less diverse populations, afford more opportunities for intra-religious cooperation and dialogue?
It is themes and findings such as these that are being shared with the broader public and the academic community. Listed on the handout are lectures, presentations and recent articles resulting from the fruits of our labour, as we make an attempt to share our findings as they are being made. The RDK project has also spurred on related research efforts among upper-year and graduate students interested and/or involved in the project. My own MA research is a spin-off of RDK, as I am currently examining the private religious use of Kingston's public spaces and the ways in which Kingston is adapting its municipal policies in order to address the City's religious diversity. Hopefully my MA work will be of service to Dr. James by examining a topic pertinent to RDK's goals, for which the project timeline and budget may not have allowed.
In closing, I would like to say that now is an exciting time to be involved in a diversity project. As someone who is at the beginning of my academic career, I predict interesting times ahead as we each analyze the findings of our respective projects as they unfold. It is a wonderful thing to be engaged in a project that is academically and personally challenging, never boring, and pertinent, for I believe Canadians' understanding of our country's religious landscape will be the better for our efforts and I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone here success in their endeavours.
Laurie K. Gashinski, Research Assistant,
Religious Diversity in Kingston