The Cascadia bioregion – British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon – has long been at the forefront of cultural shifts occurring throughout North America, in particular regarding religious institutions, ideas, and practices. Religion at the Edge explores the rise of religious “nones,” the decline of mainstream Christian denominations, spiritual and environmental innovation, increasing religious pluralism, and the growth of smaller, more traditional faith groups in Cascadia. This volume is the first research-driven book to address religion, spirituality, and irreligion in the Pacific Northwest, past and present. Employing surveys, archival sources, interviews, and focus groups, contributors showcase a spectrum of adherents from Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Baha’i, New Age, Indigenous, and irreligious communities. Religion at the Edge expands our understanding of contemporary society, pursuing empirical and theoretical debates about the nature, scale, and implications of socio-religious changes in North America, and the relevance of regionalism to that discussion.

Paul Bramadat is a professor and director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria. His previous works include Religious Radicalization in Canada and Beyond and Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada both published by University of Toronto Press.

Paul Bramadat's profile page

Patricia O'Connell Killen's profile page

Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. She completed her DPhil (PhD equivalent) in sociology at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include quantitative methods, sociology of religion, immigration and ethnicity and political sociology.

Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme's profile page

Readers seeking information about secularism, the spiritual-but-not-religious cohort, environmentalism and religion, and the future of religion across Canada and the United States will want to read Religion at the Edge... Highly recommend.

Nova Religio

I highly recommend [Religin at the Edge] as a tool for meeting Cascadian people at their spiritual heart.

BC Studies

I deeply relate to the stories of the interviewees...By reading this book, I feel, as a pastor, the sense of getting an inside look at the religious mindset of our region.

Christ & Cascadia

With Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality, and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest, Bramadat and his collaborators have given us a clutch of rich essays.

Literary Review of Canada