> Are you talking about Canada? Because in the USA, religion has a hold
> even on the urban working class.
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Sure, I know what the polls say, but beneath the polls, I suppose it depends
on what is meant by religion having a "hold" on people.
It's true that most people continue to self-identify with the religions they were born into - in much the same way as they do in relation to their inherited race, gender, and ethnicity. This is true even in Canada, although Americans practice these forms of "identity politics" more than most, or perhaps more loudly than most. But these attachments tend to be largely casual and passive, a means of retaining childhood ties to families and communities, except in those historically specific instances when discrimination on any of these grounds has provoked a strong political response. It seems to me that outside of the Sunbelt small towns and rural areas and among recent immigrants, reliigion doesn't have the same hold on people as it once did - especially so in the big cities, where the working class is concentrated. That's what urbanization does, as you know. The more cosmopolitan cities and the commercial and scientific demands of economic development corrode conservative values, including religious ones, whose origins lie in the countryside.
Today, in the absence of militant working-class political action, I'd say the strongest identification working people have is with the sports teams in their cities. They're far more likely to take an intense interest in sports than what is happening in their churches, and there is correspondingly more media coverage of team sports than of religion and more marketing of sports paraphenalia than religious iconacry. By far. Am I wrong in supposing that if Yankee Stadium were as freely accessible as mass at St Patrick's Cathedral, most Catholic New Yorkers would opt for the stadium? After sports, it is nationalism which arouses the most popular passions, especially in the US. But I don't think "Americanism" is the religion under discussion here.
My impression is that, whatever their overt sentiments about religion, there is very little to choose between the religious practice of most New Yorkers or Chicagoans or San Franciscans and those of Torontonians or Montrealers. The cultural fault lines are between the cities and the surrounding hinterlands in both countries - including within their respective rural states and provinces - than between the countries themselves.