Well, according to this piece in Britain’s Prospect Magazine anyway. In Breeding for God, the author Eric Kaufman argues that in the battle between secularism and religion, religion is winning because, put simply, religious people breed.
The share of the world’s population that is religious is growing, after nearly a century of modest decline. This effect has been produced by the younger generations in the developing world rejecting secularisation, combined with higher religious fertility levels. Throughout the world, the religious tend to have more children, irrespective of age, education or wealth. “Secular” Europe is no exception. In an analysis of European data from ten west European countries in the period 1981-2004 I found that next to age and marital status, a woman’s religiosity was the strongest predictor of her number of offspring.
Given the link between religious beliefs and political views, there are other ramifications to this trend.
As Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a ‘fertility gap’ of 41 per cent.
Arthur Brooks’ article can be found here. As much of this growth, particularly in Europe, is driven by Muslim birthrates, it may have some interesting consequences. The author suggests that it may lead to a more aggressively secular response from the state (as seen most recently in the Dutch niqab ban) or a reassertion of Christian identity.
The future response of Europe’s lapsed Christian population to the growth of European Islam is difficult to gauge. Muslim growth may prompt a more strident secular nationalist response, as it seems to have done in France and Holland, or it may lead to a renewed emphasis on Christian identity (see the recent speeches of Pope Benedict). David Voas and Steve Bruce have found evidence for the latter in the 2001 British census, where the proportion of white British respondents describing themselves as Christian (rather than “no religion”) was higher in districts with large Muslim populations. Christian identity does not equate to growing religious belief, but it eventually might. In ethnically divided Northern Ireland, sectarian conflict fuels far higher religiosity than in other parts of Britain. In either case, the combination of a fast-growing Muslim community and a stable or slowly growing Christian population will squeeze the non-religious, causing a major reversal of the secularising trends of the past 50 to 100 years.
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I think there might be some merit in this argument.
Amir,
Do you think that to a certain extent the reverse could happen in the Muslim countries as Muslim countries advance more in technology and more people become more secular – albeit not to the extent of Europe.
In other words, we could see a secularizing (and again I don’t mean Kemalism here) trend over the next 50 years in the Muslim world before seeing this type of religious trend.
The pendulum could swing the other way for a time before it starts to correct itself
I think it’s already happening.
Although Muslim populations are, taken as a whole, growing and Muslim fertility rates are the second highest in the world, there is a disparity within the Muslim world: countries such as Somalia, for example, have a far higher fertility rate than Algeria, Qatar or Iran. There isn’t really a measure of ‘modernisation’ that can be easily used for comparison purposes, but there does seem to be a inverse correlation between literacy rates and fertility rates. Therefore, it is fair to say that as literacy improves and societies become more ‘modern’ the current rates of growth in the Muslim world will eventually decline. I recall reading some studies by UN demographers predicting a Muslim population decline in 2050; whilst European population decline would more or less slow down.
(1) It is not clear what ’secularism’ means here. Is it a political term? If so, of what kind? Is it a term relating to personal theological beliefs?
(2) Assuming (1) can be worked out, demographic arguments are always overly simplistic anyway. “Religious” societies become “secular” societies over long periods of time due to a multiplicity of factors. (Obviously it is not the case that when enough babies have been “born secular”, they form a ground-swell of people who then “make” a country secular.)
Of course, all of this is also predicated on the assumption that religious parents beget religious children and secular parents naturally produce secular children. This obviously isn’t the case. And the researchers’ definition of ‘religiousness’ is more likely to be based on what the survey subjects identified themselves as rather than any definition that would be meaningful to Muslims.
Anyway, Futurepundit.com has some thoughts on the research including a pointer to some research that suggests ‘religiousity’ is inherited.
Finally a explanation for why there are so many Irish people and Irish pubs everywhere I go. Given that Islam is some 600 years younger than Christianity does that mean if I was alive in 600 years I will have to put up with a heap of Saudis and there will be Saudi pubs everywhere?
You may be interested in my post on the re-Christianisation of Europe that quotes this article and a number of other sources.
On the likelihood of the re-Christianisation of Europe and Britain.
although this seems to be evidence to the contrary:
http://www.angus-reid.com/anal.....emID=13765
http://www.angus-reid.com/poll.....emID=13764
amir wrote: “…there is a disparity within the Muslim world: countries such as Somalia, for example, have a far higher fertility rate than Algeria, Qatar or Iran.”
Well, yes and no. Somalia’s raw numbers are extremely high for both birth rate (43.13) and death rate (16.63), which isn’t surprising for a war-torn country. However, if you compare the birth rate to the death rate, Somalia is actually the lowest country of the four you mentioned. There are 2.71 births for every death in Somalia, compared to 3.71 for Algeria, 3.30 for Qatar and 3.06 for Iran. (The world average is 2.31; statistics are from the CIA’s World Factbook.)
“There isn’t really a measure of ‘modernisation’ that can be easily used for comparison purposes, but there does seem to be a inverse correlation between literacy rates and fertility rates.”
I’ve done a bit of research into these topics (demographics, literacy rates, etc.), and agree that there is this inverse correlation between literacy and fertility. Literacy, of course, can lead to greater economic prosperity, and the latter often reduces the fertility rate. Nor is the phemonenon new: the Emperor Augustus once soundly criticized the patrician class for not having enough babies, going so far as to lower the legal marriage age for a girl to 12. However, if you ran a regression analysis, I think you’d find stronger correlations to birth rates tied into life expectancy and death rates. Just a brief look at the numbers will give an idea of the correlations.
In The Economist’s “Pocket World in Figures, 2004 Edition” (a book I purchased a few years ago and happen to have handy), the top three countries for highest fertility rates (2000-05) were Niger, Somalia and Angola (this statistic shows the average number of children per woman; for crude birth rates, the top three countries were Liberia, Niger and Somalia, with Angola fourth). For lowest life expectancy (both sexes), Niger comes in 24th, Somalia 28th, and Angola 10th. (These life expectancies are in the late 30s – late 40s.) For death rates, Niger came in 19th, Somalia tied for 22nd, and Angola 7th. Not surprisingly, the Sub-Sahara African countries dominate these statistics, just as they do for GDP per head, purchasing power, and literacy.
[...] In an earlier post, we mentioned an apparent correlation between birth rates and ‘religiousness’. The European Union’s demographic statistics for 2004 suggest a slightly different correlation: that member states with high fertility rates also seem to have a high rate of births outside of wedlock. [...]
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