Under French control In the early 1600s, the French were the first European nation to establish permanent colonies in Canada, calling the areas they colonized
New France. The French attempted to set up these colonies in a way that established the Roman Catholic Church as the foundation of colonial society and gave the Roman Catholic Church a monopoly on religion, with only French-born Roman Catholics being allowed to immigrate to New France after 1627 . The majority of French were Roman Catholic, but there were smaller populations of Protestants and Jews in New France. These non-Catholics who were barred from public worship, public office, and most professions. The British sought to expand Protestant faith throughout the territory through missionary conversions of native populations and the immigration of Protestants to Canada, favoring the British
Church of England and initially suppressing the Roman Catholic Church . Following the
American Revolution, there was a large influx of
United Empire Loyalist Protestants from the
United States into Canada. Immigrants from many different Protestant faiths came to Canada, introducing these various Protestant faiths to the religious landscape and further preventing the establishment of the Church of England as Canada's official religion. This ambition was wholly abandoned by the mid-1800s, with Christian religious pluralism fully acknowledged and accepted, though Canada was still considered a Christian society. There was eventually an influx of Roman Catholic and other non-Protestant Christian immigrants to Canada, and Roman Catholicism eventually eclipsed Protestantism as the religious group with the most adherents in 1961. Roman Catholics have remained the largest religious group in Canada since 1961 and Protestant membership is declining. Religion has played a large role in Canadian public life and politics, and secularization in Canada was a long process. Though it began long before then, the 1960s saw the dramatic secularization of Canadian institutions, such as education. Canada detached their institutions from religion as part of an effort to modernize these institutions. There has also been an increase in the numbers of those with no religious affiliation and those belonging to a non-Protestant or Catholic faith. While Protestantism was once the faith of the majority in Canada, the Protestant share of the population has declined by over half of what it was around 150 years ago. == Notable branches ==