The Bible and Us

Executive Summary

In the summer of 2022, the Canadian Bible Society supported Cardus to undertake a survey with the Angus Reid Institute to find out how Canadians engage with and understand the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The resulting report, “The Sacred Texts: Canadian Perspectives on the Bible, Qu’ran, Torah, and Their Place in Modern Society,” was released in December 2022. This follow-up report now uses the survey data to delve more deeply into the responses of one group of respondents, Canadian Christians, and their engagement with and attitudes toward the Bible specifically.

This paper is organized by a series of overarching thematic questions: How do Canadian Christians read the Bible? Why do they read the Bible? What do they think about the Bible? and Do they know the Bible? At the conclusion of each section, we highlight some of the key challenges and opportunities that we think the survey findings reveal. We then provide some discussion questions to help animate conversations in churches and Christian institutions across the country. A secondary goal of this paper is to inform Canadians in general about how their fellow citizens who identify as Christians engage with the Bible.

The survey shows that there are often significant differences among Christians in how, when, and why they read the Bible. It also reveals that Christians are reading the Bible in different ways, both in terms of reading it in its physical or online form and also in what they understand from their reading. It is those takeaways that often reveal some of the greatest differences among Canadian Christians’ attitudes about the Bible and its role in their lives and in the life of our country.