Painting a portrait of religion in Kingston

By Karolyn Coorsh

The Kingston Whig-Standard

Saturday, October 11, 2003 - 07:00

A map of Kingston dotted with 100 coloured thumbtacks, each denoting a religious site, hangs in Prof. Bill James's office at Theological Hall at Queen's University. It's a telltale sign that James's wide-ranging study of religion in Kingston is well underway.

The religious studies professor intends to literally map out the city's contemporary religious landscape. The clusters of red, white, yellow, blue and green tacks form a mosaic of various places of worship and religious centres.

With the help of four research assistants, James is compiling 100 profiles of religious groups, sites and activities in Kingston which will later be made available on the Internet.

"I feel exhausted just talking about it," James says in an interview.

He embarked on the endeavour after taking an interest in a similar study being conducted at Harvard University. He decided to take the methods and apply them to a Canadian city. "I couldn't believe that no one had actually done this, but it's true," he says.

"Kingston is a city of institutions. In many ways it's largely unchanged for 300 years, it's mostly unilingual and so it's discrete and stable enough to able to get a handle on."Part of what he's doing is developing a model that could be applied to a number of mid-sized Canadian cities, he says. "My focus is more total. It's restricted to a small to medium-sized city so it's doable in a way that it wouldn't be for other cities."

James's study won't focus solely on the major religions. Next year, the research team will turn its attention to religion in institution--prisons, schools, hospitals, the military base.

Among the topics James hopes to delve into is what he calls multi-layered spirituality, a term used to describe how some people combine various rituals or beliefs. "Is someone who's going to a particular Christian church also participating in a Wiccan group or practising Aboriginal spiritual practices?" James asks. "And how are they putting together their own spirituality from diverse sources?"

He says there are census figures that give bare numbers for most religious communities in Kingston but he hopes to discover what those numbers say about the city.

At the end of the research, he'll write a book about the findings, which will outline the trends discovered along the way. "What we hope to track and, in a way, to leave behind is some kind of picture or analysis of what religion is like in the early 21st century in Kingston."

The study, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, will also look into religions that aren't in the Kingston public eye and may only be practised at home. "We've got Hinduism, which isn't represented in a formal site because it can be mostly practised in people's homes," James says. "That, in a way, is part of the quarrel I have with sociological surveys, because they tend to deal with what's visible, what's available." "We want to dig a little bit and find out what else is going on."

James will also study ethnic diversity within the religions. He cites many examples of such diversity in Kingston, like the Chinese Alliance Church on Brock Street and the Greek Orthodox Church on Johnson Street.

According to Statistics Canada's 2001 census report, the city's largest religious community is Roman Catholic, which represents about one-third of Kingston's population. The next largest is the United Church with 17.2 per cent of the population, followed by Anglican with 13.3 per cent and Muslim with 3.1 per cent [Note: Actually, 0.6% of Kingston's population is Muslim, the same as the percentage that is Jewish. The figure of 3.1 % represents the percentage of Muslims in Ontario. wcj]. Daniel Elkin, rabbi at Beth Israel Synagogue, estimates that about 200 Jewish families live in Kingston, plus 200 Jews who have no affiliation to the synagogue.

Almost 18 per cent of Kingston's population cites no religious affiliation. Nationally, 16.2 per cent of Canadians say they have no religious affiliation. It has been theorized that as young people grow older they tend to return to some form of faith, but James is skeptical.

"I think that religion will exist and spirituality will be there, but it may be pursued outside the walls of churches and synagogues and formal religious sites." "I think it's part of the question we're asking, whether religion has left the public sphere."

James and his research staff will discuss the religious diversity project on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Indigo bookstore, 259 Princess St.

To find out more about the project, go to http://post.queensu.ca/~jameswc/ rdk.