THE TREND OF INTERFAITH MARRIAGES IN CANADA: 1922-1957.

Popular literature has frequently discussed a purported trend toward increased interfaith marriages in the United States. The present research was conducted under the premise that a study of Canadian statistics would not only be of interest in its own right but might also prove useful in analyzing the trend in the United States. In this study an interfaith marriage is defined as one in which the religion reported by one spouse at the time of marriage differs from that reported by the other. It should be emphasized that alternative definitions of interfaith marriage might yield trends unlike that discussed here. A steady rise from 5.8 per cent in 1927 to 11.5 per cent in 1957 in the proportion of inter-faith marriages in Canada as a whole has been observed. For Protestants the direction of the trend is positive, and its consistency is extremely high. for each province except Newfoundland, where only two observations are available. Although the direction for Catholics is always positive, the consistency of the trend in each province is substantially less than for Protestants. Although the provinces vary considerably in their proportions of inter-faith marriage, in each, the direction of the movement is positive. The increase in propor- tion of interfaith marriages shows great regularity in all provinces except Quebec.