I REMEMBER it was the dead of January, and I was a guest of the Jewish community in Windsor, Ontario. I called the local Reform temple to ask if I might be able to visit on Friday night. The lay leader enthusiastically welcomed me to their small Shabbat service, and invited me to each event thereafter. The scholar in me got to wondering: Where did the community fall on the religiosity spectrum? Were there any patterns I might discover in who engaged religiously and who did not?
I decided to launch a research study called “Progressives and Purists: A Study of Religiosity in a Canadian-Jewish Community.” To measure religiosity, I asked community members about eight indicators in total. For the article that emerged from this research, I focused on three of those in particular: whether respondents believe in God (58% did, 16% did not, and the rest were in between); whether they prayed (16% did daily, 42% did sometimes or on holidays, and 32% did not — with another 6% saying they talked to God), and whether they limited their activities on Shabbat (34% did).
I concluded that the community did not seem particularly religious. To explain these results, I drew on work done by two esteemed political scientists, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They developed a view called existential security theory, which holds that as a person’s sense of internal security increases, their religiosity decreases. Since the respondents in my survey were highly educated and living in a free country like Canada — that is, since they were likely to feel quite secure — I could see how religion might be less consequential to them. In the study, 82% of participants had at least one post-secondary credential; it certainly appears there is an inverse relationship between education and religiosity.
It is well worth studying whether this relationship characterizes other Jewish communities in Canada. For example, a larger survey that included more Orthodox Jewish participants might be useful in testing this relationship between education and religiosity more closely. Modern Orthodox Jews are strongly encouraged to study both religious and secular subjects; this might confound the otherwise expected inverse relationship between education and religiosity, even in a cohort that feels itself to be secure.
