When Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” he added a question: “What kind of a sponge does it take to wipe away a whole horizon?” I often ask that question because just in my own lifetime there has been an unprecedented decline in the number of people who go to church regularly and, more recently, an equally unprecedented spike in the number of people who claim to have lost their faith and are now classified under a religious category called “None”.
This latter group (people who when asked about their religious affiliation on a census form answer with the word “None”) has essentially doubled in the last 20 years, and today in Canada and the United States make up more than 30 per cent of the population. The numbers are much the same for western Europe and other secularised parts of the world.
