The French Canadian writer Yann Martel has acknowledged that he rearranged chapters in the Canadian edition of his new novel, "Life of Pi," because he feared that Canadians would be offended by its religious content.
"America is a very religious, almost puritanical country," he told Publishers Weekly last year. "In Canada, secularism is triumphant, and to talk noncynically, nonironically about religion is strange."
Mr. Martel's comments have been much quoted of late as a sign that in at least one vital respect, Canadian and American societies are moving in opposite directions despite their common language and geographical proximity.
In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington, only 30 percent of Canadians said religion was very important to them, compared with 59 percent of Americans. Twenty-one percent of Canadians said they attended religious services regularly in another survey taken in 2000 about half the rate for Americans (although still a bit higher than the rate for most of Western Europe).
The statistics would be far more skewed if it were not for the growing number of devout Muslim, Sikh and Hindu immigrants to Canada. In Mr. Martel's city of Montreal, which is crowned by a giant illuminated cross atop Mount Royal, to commemorate the piety of its founder, Paul de Chomedy de Maisonneuve, church attendance is plummeting so fast that at least 18 churches in the last three years have been boarded up and abandoned or converted into condominiums and, in one case, even a pizza parlor. Meanwhile, rural churches are closing across the western prairies.
"This is a society where religion no longer wields cultural authority," Marguerite Van Die, a theology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, wrote recently.
In stark contrast with American presidents, Canadian prime ministers rarely, if ever, speak in religious terms. They even avoid being photographed attending church.
It would be almost unthinkable for a prime minister to say "God Bless Canada." It was not until after Pierre Trudeau died that Canadians learned that their former prime minister was a devoutly religious Catholic.
Mr. Trudeau was a champion of keeping government out of the bedroom, and most Canadian politicians have followed that example. The few Canadian politicians who have raised abortion as an issue have suffered at the polls for doing so, even in conservative provinces like Alberta.
Though widening in recent years, Canadian scholars note, the divergence over religious content in Canadian and American societies goes back to different colonial pasts.
The Puritans who came to the New World in the 17th century as religious refugees never considered colonizing Canada's eastern coast, because it was French and Roman Catholic. They went instead to Massachusetts, where their ideas of having a predestined and godly obligation to transmit their ideals to the world deeply influenced the founders of the United States.
"Religious rhetoric has played an important role in sanctifying major American political actions beginning with the War of Independence," said Stephen A. Kent, a University of Alberta sociologist. Canada has never had a revolution or civil war or expansionist foreign policy, he noted, "so there was no need to sanctify major political events."
Even before Canada was formed, the British saw the need to play down religion in the political sphere. They ceded the French colonists of the newly conquered New France (today's Quebec) broader religious freedoms than even those available to Catholics living in Britain in the late 18th century. Otherwise, they would have risked rebellion or losing the territory to the pesky Americans.
"Ever since, the way to deal with religion is to avoid it," said David Marshall, a University of Calgary historian, "because it is divisive, it is not part of our tradition."
The one place in Canada where organized religion played as lasting and important a cultural role as it did in the United States was in Quebec, where the Roman Catholic Church ran schools, hospitals and otherwise set the moral tone until the "Quiet Revolution" of the 1960's. Quebec was then transformed by a generational shift in favor of sovereignty and freer social mores, and in opposition to a conservative authoritarian provincial government closely linked to the clergy.
It is traditional for American leaders to speak of faith during moments they seek to bind the country. Not Canadian politicians. To have done as the Americans in the past would have risked exacerbating the great divide between Catholic Quebec and the rest of the country where Protestants dominate. Now to do so, with the entire nation becoming increasingly secular, would simply be irrelevant.
The "culture wars" simply do not resonate in Canada, in large part because Canadian Protestants are more mainstream, homogeneous and closer to their country's intelligentsia than their American counterparts. Fundamentalist evangelicalism is not a major current in Canada, while the traditional Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches here remain content to keep religion a private matter and largely out of the public domain.