10_Studies_Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth

8/3/2019 10_Studies_Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth

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Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth

For many, the Catholic Church's recent troubles in Ireland symbolise the demise of a once

mighty institution. Throughout the country, pews increasingly stand empty while churches

seem ever more dominated by old folk. Vocations to the priesthood are dwindling. Insiders

worry that the young are being lost - forever - to the faith. In Ireland and beyond, Richard

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens captain a growing atheist movement. Are we on the crest

of a new, rational era? Is the end of faith nigh? If so, this would vindicate the prophesies of

many, including Karl Marx, who remarked that 'all that is sacred is profaned', Friedrich

Nietzsche, who flatly pronounced, 'God is Dead', and Matthew Arnold, who lamented

religion's 'long, withdrawing roar' which he compared to the tide going out at Dover Beach.

But if we take a hard look at the numbers, religion seems to be swimming against the tide.

Why? First, we are in the midst of a global demographic revolution which benefits religious

parts of the world. Second, secularisation is slowing down and stopping in the least religious

parts of the world. Finally, religious women - especially ascetic fundamentalists - have larger

families than secular women.

First, it is worth mentioning that the decline of communism and mass rural-urban

migration are fanning religious revival in the developing world. Pentecostalism and Islam are

the most obvious beneficiaries, but others, from Mormons and Adventists to Jehovah's

Witnesses , are notching up record growth. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of the

Economist outline this in detail in their bookGod is Back(2008). But scratch beneath the

trends in conversion, and it remains a fact that most people on this planet inherit their religion

from their parents. Patterns of population change are thus the most radical engine of growth.

97 percent of the world's population growth is presently occurring in the poor, religious,


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developing world. in 1950, Europe (including the USSR), North America and Australasia

comprised about 30 percent of the world's population. Today, these regions account for just

11 percent of those under the age of 15 and even in the West a growing proportion of the

youngest generation - half in the US - are of non-European ancestry. During the 2020s,

Ethiopia and Uganda will both surpass Russia in population. In 1950, there were two and a

half Europeans for every African. By 2050, the UN projects four Africans for every

European.

What does this mean for religion? Basically, that the devout parts of the world are

disproportionately benefiting from population explosion while the reverse is true of the more

secular West and East Asia. Therefore, according to the World Religious Database, the

proportion of the world that is religious increased from 81 to 85 percent between 1970 and

2000, and is projected to rise to 87 percent by 2025. The Gallup World Poll reports that the

proportion of worldwide weekly church attenders is expected to grow from 50 to 54 percent

between 2010 and 2050. As David Quinn recently wrote, the Catholic Church has increased

its membership by 12 percent since 2000, largely in Africa and Asia. (David Quinn, Irish

Independent, 30 April 2010)

There are plenty of precedents for this kind of religious population change. Rodney

Stark, for example, has shown how early Christians' slight demographic advantage - a

function of superior care of their sick, a family-centred ethos and a high percentage of female

converts - explains much of the increase in the ranks of the 'Jesus Movement' between 30 and

300 A.D. 40 percent per decade growth is sufficient to account for Christians' expansion from

40 to 6 million converts in this period prior to Christianity becoming Rome's official religion.

The Mormons have enjoyed the same rate of growth since their founding in 1830 and if this

continues they will emerge as one of the world's major religions in the next century. (Stark

1996) Consider the increase in the conservative share of white Protestantism in the United


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States: of white Protestants born in 1900, two-thirds belonged to mainline denominations. Yet

among those born in 1975, nearly two-thirds were conservative. As Mike Hout, Andrew

Greeley and Melissa Wilde discovered, this shift was not principally due to the appeal of

evangelicalism to Episcopalians. The one-child advantage of mostly southern and rural

conservative Protestants over mainline Protestants, maintained for over half a century,

explains 75 percent of the change. (Hout, Greeley et al. 2001)

Or look at Roman Catholicism in the United States: 20-30 percent of those raised as

Catholics are now secular or members of Protestant denominations. Yet the sheer power of

Latino Catholic immigration and high fertility (2.84 children per woman compared to 2.08

for the national average in 2003) is enough to more than overcome this. At those rates - even

with the same pace of losses to secularism and Protestantism - Catholicism will be America's

largest religion by 2040. Likewise, in a decade, fast-reproducing Mormons and Muslims will

outnumber American Jews - with their low 1.43 fertility rate. (Skirbekk, Kaufmann et al.

2010)

It's one thing to speak of the rise of the religion in the global South, but why would

this affect us in the West? Consider what's happening to European demography. By 2050,

nearly 40 percent of Europeans will be over age 60, an unprecedented population structure in

human history. European populations are actually already shrinking - this is evident in

Eastern Europe, but is masked by immigration in the western part of the continent. If the total

fertility rate of much of southern and eastern Europe and East Asia (1.3) persists, these

countries will be only a quarter of their present size in 2100. The North-South disparity will

peak around 2050 and will drive migration from expanding religious regions to the

demographically-declining secular West. This will bolster religion despite some losses to

secularism. Already we find that Christianity has held its own in London since 1989 while

nosediving 40 percent in the rest of England. London, with a sixth of England's population,


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contains 57 percent of all its Christian worshippers in their 20s. Unsurprisingly, 60 percent of

London's Christians are nonwhite and many of the city's white Christians are also of

immigrant origin. London is home to 53 percent of English Pentecostals. While mainstream

denominations have lost members, immigrant-driven Pentecostalism has grown. Furthermore,

English weekly mosque attendance now outpaces weekly attendance at Church of England

services. In France, evangelical Protestants, largely pentecostal and Parisian, have swelled

from 50 to 400 thousand inside 50 years, chiefly through African immigration. (Jenkins

2007)

Religion is booming in Europe's immigrant gateway cities and this will spread as the

proportion of non-Europeans in western Europe triples in the decades up to 2050. This

growth would matter less if we could readily identify a path to secularisation. However, the

children of nonwhites in Europe - especially if they are not Christian - tend to stick with the

faith of their parents to anchor their ethnic identity. Think of Northern Ireland: it is by far the

most religious part of the UK because ethnic identity motivates religiosity. This 'cultural

defense' function of religion, noted even by secularisation theorists like Steve Bruce and

David Martin, gives religion 'secular' work to do and insulates it from decline.

Islam

This is especially noticeable for Islam. Trends across the full range of European countries

sampled in the 2004 European Social Survey and 1999-2000 European Values Survey show

that younger Muslims are as religious as their elders. This diverges from the trend of religious

decline among younger generations that one notices among European Christians, especially

Catholics. These studies suffer from small Muslim sample sizes, but surveys which

oversample ethnic minorities and immigrants reveal powerful religiosity among European-

born Muslims. Furthermore, studies of second generation ethnic Turks and Moroccans in


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Holland, Sweden, Belgium and Germany find little difference in the religiosity of immigrant

and European-born generations. This confounds the secularising assumptions developed to

explain patterns of religious adherence among European Christians. Many young European

Muslims, not fully attached to their parents' ethnic identities nor to their European nations,

have gravitated to transnational Islam. They may also be more radical - a British study found

that more under-25s than over-55s supported shari'a and Muslim-only schools and the young

were also more likely to condone violence to defend Islam. (Mirza, Senthilkumaran et al.

2007)

Another possible route to secularisation is through intermarriage with the host

population. It is well known that interfaith marriage leads to weaker religious attachments

among the children. However, here again, non-Christian faiths like Islam seem to be

maintaining their boundaries with the host society. In Britain, over 90 percent of Muslims

marry Muslims. The same is true in Germany and most continental European countries

except for France. French exceptionalism owes a great deal to the particular ethnic makeup of

its Muslims. These are disproportionately drawn from those of Kabyle Berber and Algerian

loyalist background, groups which historically opposed the Arabo-Islamist ideology of

Algeria. This also explains the high degree of secularism found within this group. To an

extent we also see this with small minorities like anti-Islamist Iranians in Germany whose

families left Iran in response to the Islamic Revolution.

Figure 1 shows, however, that these are exceptions to the rule. In Britain, for instance,

Muslim ethnic groups like Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are heavily inmarried, with a

significant proportion hailing from specific rural regions like Sylhet in Bangladesh and

Mirpur in Pakistan. These links often structure marriage patterns and networks of exchange.

The same is true of Turks in Holland, Germany and other European countries, who maintain


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strong ties to their rural Anatolian villages where the European-born often return to seek their

spouse.

Figure 1

Source: 2001 UK Census

The result of high retention and strong population growth through fertility and

immigration is the spectacular growth of Europe's Muslim population. Prophets of 'Eurabia'

such as Mark Steyn and Melanie Phillips are incorrect to foresee a Muslim-dominated Europe

in our century. However, if Muslim fertility rates in Europe and the Muslim world remained

as they are today, then George Weigel, Bernard Lewis and Chris Caldwell would be correct

in their appraisal that many western European countries would be majority Muslim by the

next century. However, every measure of Muslim family size in Europe and the Muslim

world shows a rapid decline - with rates halving between the 1970s and 90s, and dropping at

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%90%

100%

B Caribbean Chinese B African Pakistani Bangladeshi

Ethnic Endogamy Rates, Couples, 2001 UK Census


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the same rate between the 90s and 2000s. In figure 2, we see the difference this will make in

the case of Austria, which is one of the few countries to collect religion data on its census. Its

under-15 population would be majority Muslim if their one child advantage over the rest of

the population persisted. However, given recent trends, fertility convergence by 2030 is the

most likely scenario - which leads to the proportion of Muslims among the under-15s

stabilising at the still significant 20 percent level in 2100. The same trend - albeit with

varying start and end points - can be found across a range of west European countries, with

Spain the least Muslim and Sweden the most by 2050. (Pew 2010)

Figure 2

Source: Anne Goujon, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, 2010

Immigration may be the most visible sign of the demographic resacaralisation of Europe. And

it will certainly have the biggest impact in the next 50 years, as the world's north-south

Current MuslimFertility

Muslim FertilityConverges to

Average by 2030

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

PercentMuslim

Proportion of Muslims in Austria's under-15 Population,2000-2100


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population pressure gradient hits its zenith. But the replacement of secular people with

religious ones is not the only demographic force working against secularism. In the long run,

as third world demographic transitions run their course and first world fertility convergence

takes place, one could argue that secularisation might make a comeback.

Yet this would be to ignore the second major dynamic of religious demography: direct

religious pronatalism. This has nothing to do with immigration, and is reshaping populations

as we speak. Across the world, the data shows that a women's religiosity is often as important

as her income or education in determining how many children she will bear. As we

modernise, the material drivers of birth rates - the need for hands to work the land, high

infant mortality and a dearth of contraception - fade away. In a modern urban context,

therefore, we have almost complete control over our family size. This means that values play

a bigger role in determining fertility. Seculars avail themselves of the freedom to have small

families and delay parenthood; moderate religious people have somewhat larger families and

the most world-denying of fundamentalists opt to resist the demographic transition altogether.

For instance, in France, observant white Catholic women bear about a half-child more

than secular women. In Spain, 200 observant Catholic parents will bear an average of 177

children over their lives against just 100 for their secular counterparts. Fundamentalists are

especially fecund: ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel average 7.5 children apiece against

little more than 2 for mainstream Jews. Orthodox Calvinist villages are the youngest places in

Holland. Muslim women in Middle Eastern cities who are most supportive of shari'a law

have twice the birth rate of those Muslim women who are most opposed to shari'a. In the

United States, Mormons and neofundamentalist Protestants average one child per woman

more than the national average. The Quiverfull neo-Calvinist pronatalist movement take

things even further, advocating 'God as family planner'. Its leaders envision themselves

presiding over 'dynasties' of hundreds of thousands of descendants and promote a '200-year


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plan' for dominating the United States by outbreeding the less devout. In a century or two, as

the world's population contracts, these small explosive movements could change the world.

Indeed, were it not for large families, Mormons would be a minority of Utah's population,

rather than 75 percent. Ultra-Orthodox Jews already form a third of Israel's Jewish first

graders, up from a few percent in 1960 and will comprise a majority of Jews in Israel and the

diaspora by the second half of this century. Once again, demography holds the key to these

social and political changes.

Europe is experiencing a slowing of secularism among its native Christian population;

a transition toward control of family size which benefits the religious - notably

fundamentalists - against the nonreligious; and an unprecedented population aging and

decline in the context of religious immigration. Put it all together and it quickly becomes

apparent why, despite secularisation, Europe will be more religious in 2100 than it is today.

References:

Hout, M., A. Greeley, et al. (2001). "The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change in the

United States." American Journal of Sociology 107(2): 468-500.

Jenkins, P. (2007). God's continent : Christianity, Islam, and Europe's religious crisis. Oxford

; New York, Oxford University Press.

Mirza, M., A. Senthilkumaran, et al. (2007). 'Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the

paradox of multiculturalism'. London, Policy Exchange.


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Skirbekk, V., E. Kaufmann, et al. (2010). "Secularism, Fundamentalism or Catholicism? The

Religious Composition of the United States to 2043." Journal for the Scientific Study of

Religion 49(2 ).

Stark, R. (1996). The Rise of Christianity: a Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton, N.J.

Eric Kaufmann is author ofShall the Religious Inherit the Earth: demography and politics in

the twenty-first century (Profile Books, 2010)

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10_Studies_Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth