Canada

Canada is religiously diverse and increasingly unaffiliated, with the most recent national census recording Christians, split between Catholic and various Protestant denominations, at just over half the population, religiously unaffiliated Canadians forming the second largest group at over a third, and Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Jewish communities each in the low single digits, figures broadly reflected in Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020.

French Catholic colonization of Quebec from the early seventeenth century and British Protestant settlement of the remaining colonies produced Canada's foundational Catholic-Protestant divide, formalized constitutionally through provisions protecting denominational school rights at Confederation in 1867, a compromise designed specifically to protect the Catholic minority outside Quebec and the Protestant minority within it.

Indigenous First Nations, Metis and Inuit spiritual traditions, encompassing enormous diversity across the country's many distinct peoples and generally centered on relationships with land, animals and ancestral or spirit beings, were subjected to sustained suppression through the Canadian residential school system, operated substantially by Catholic and Protestant churches under government mandate from the 1880s until the last school closed in 1996, a system whose documented abuses a 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission characterized as cultural genocide.

Canada's Indian residential school system, which forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families and communities and operated substantially through Catholic, Anglican, United Church and Presbyterian institutions under federal government mandate from the 1880s until 1996, subjected an estimated 150,000 children to systematic suppression of Indigenous language, spirituality and culture alongside well-documented physical and sexual abuse, and the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report, drawing on years of survivor testimony, concluded the system amounted to cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.

The 2021 discovery of what ground-penetrating radar surveys identified as hundreds of probable unmarked graves at former residential school sites, beginning with the Kamloops Indian Residential School, intensified national reckoning with church complicity, prompting the Catholic Church, whose orders had run the majority of residential schools, to issue a formal papal apology when Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 and, subsequently, to begin releasing some historical records to Indigenous communities and researchers. Indigenous religious and cultural revitalization efforts, including the reintroduction of traditional ceremonies once banned under Canadian law until 1951, have grown substantially since, supported in part by settlement funds from the churches and government involved.