In a new and fascinating essay in Prospect Magazine called, “Breeding for God,” British political scientist Eric Kaufmann argues that demographic trends really are pushing secular Europe in a more religious and conservative direction. Even more than conversion, says Kaufmann, it was Christian fertility that delivered pagan Europe into the hands of Christianity. And now, says Kaufmann, Christian conquest by fertility is set to happen again.
Kaufmann has developed a way of balancing off the likelihood of apostasy against fertility levels, and says the results show the momentum of European secularism slowing down, and even reversing, in the coming decades. Inevitably, Kaufmann’s model is an extrapolation from current fertility and apostasy rates. And unfortunately, that begs just about every important question. It’s unclear how current rates of religious adherence will hold up under the complex economic, demographic, and cultural pressures that Europe will soon be facing. (For more, see my “Demographics and the Culture Wars.”) Kaufmann also tends to lump all religions together, passing too quickly over the huge potential conflict between Christian and Muslim Europe. Nor am I entirely convinced by Kaufmann’s claim that even non-Church-going European Christians are sufficiently religious for their faith to matter in their daily lives.
Despite these uncertainties, however, Kaufmann outlines a Western and European future every bit as plausible as the familiar vision of progressive secularist triumph. In Kaufmann’s model, there will be, “a major reversal of the secularizing trends of the past 50 to 100 years….Europeans will become more ‘traditional’ on moral issues like abortion, family values, religious education and gay marriage….by the mid-21st century, the peak of secular European politics will be long past….Much will depend on whether conservative political parties opt for a multi-ethnic religious platform or instead mobilize a white nationalist majority across the secular/religious divide….Demographic currents are carrying Europe toward a more American model of modernity….Perhaps we are entering a new stage of history in which the demographic flaws in liberalism will become more apparent.”
You can read the Eric Kaufmann piece here.
It irritates me that I come in late on posts such as this one. However, these days duty calls.
Long before population demographics decide religious matter, religions will be at loggerheads.
Joseph Campbell was prophetic. He understood that the success of capitalism and technology would take all our religions and remove them from their cultural and geographic settings.
He understood that all of our religions will be forced to interface and compete in a way that would have been impossible in earlier centuries.
Today, Catholics and Protestants have only recently reached a fairly ambivalent detente, and the Nag Hammadi documents have introduced new questions about Christian gnosticism, particularly Valentinius. (I suspect many posters on this site would have been Valentinians in the earliest days of the Catholic Church.)
So what is going to happen when every major religion in the world is going to be lined up on the same street, all competing in the marketplace? … all asserting that they alone hold the ultimate truth?
It will either be incredibly destructive or aimed at some (possibly troubled) synthesis of some sort.
My big concern and complaint is where is the sense of the Sacred in all this?
As a capitalist by profession as well as philosophical orientation, I appreciate the wonderful way that capitalism manages the food chain. However, what was once represented by Chartres Cathedral has long since been replaced by the mercantilism of the Chrylser Building.
The Sacred drifts away from us like water through our fingers. All our symbols that directed us to the numinous (and Jungians understand that a real symbol, and not just a sign, actually participates in the mystery that it portrays) have been replaced with temples to commercial activity. (I should know — I make a fairly good buck at it.)
So are we to be satisfied with the loss of the Sacred? Capitalism does not give it to us. Science, wonderful as it is, does not give it to us. Religions (God help them) with their concerns about birth rates and actuarial tables don’t often give it to us either.
Some would say the Sacred never existed in the first place. However, I disagree. My own approach suggests that these are subjects less appropriate for sociologists or scientists, and more appropriate not only for theologians and philosophers, but for poets and psychologists.
The most important things about life are not invested by commercial activity or science.
Love, friendship, an appreciation for beauty, warmth, the benevolent relationship with the animal kingdom, the unfathomable nature of bravery — basically none of these things can be bought, nor can they be scrutinized beyond a superficial level by scientific inquiry.
The Sacred and the numinous are too important to be lost.
I used to think that the only way to determine the one & true religion, was to arm all of them, stuff them in a field, and the last one left alive is the REAL THING. But there is a better way: outbreed all the other religions, ( the leftovers can be used for future cannon-fodder)
Reason is why we are here. Life is easier and more interesting when you accept that. You can also listen to others’ point and view and learn a few things.
All hail the great god Reason…that all-pervading, of a non-material, metaphysical Agent.
ex-liberal- I disagree with your view of the secular, for you immediately assume that the secular rejects the Universal and focuses only on the relativist particular. That’s invalid.
I also disagree with your definition of religion, for you have left out a key axiom, which is the acceptance of a metaphysical agent. That means that secularism is not a religion since it rejects the metaphysical agent. But it doesn’t reject Universals as Real (see Aristotle).
I’m an atheist, but I most certainly accept and indeed, require the existence of Universals and reject relativism. Universals are not only qualities, such as the emotions, but are the laws of matter – which are necessary and universal, biological laws which are equally ‘universal’ (all zebras become zebras, not butterflies), and social laws which are not only local adaptations to ecological realities (can you plant seeds or only hunt caribou?) but are universal in that humanity develops common rules in common economies.
It is false to correlate secular humanism with ‘fewer offspring’ since this relation isn’t causal; and also, the size of the population doesn’t lead to a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ society. Same with the other religions; you can’t set up a correlation and also state that a positive correlation means that one causes the other (this is basic statistics 101).
Gred – I understand your point about the ‘sacred’ (I’m not, not a fan of Joseph Campbell, but..) however, the experience of the sacred can most certainly be found within the sciences.
ET,
practicing “secular humanists” tend to be relativists. I can’t help it, it just happens to be reality. You may be an exception. Just because secular humanists do not posit a metaphysical agent does not mean that their ideology does not play the same role as ideologies that do have a metaphysical agent. Secular humanistism plays the same role as Judaism or Christianity or Islam – it replaces God with Man and then proposes ideas about how the world began, what is the meaning of life, etc. In practice secular humanism translates into each person deciding what is right and wrong for themselves.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or not, just compare societies based on Judeo-Christian values/heritage with all others. As others have said we are living off of the fruits of our Judeo-Christian heritage, but the roots are whithering.
Greg,
I used to be a big fan of Joseph Campbell and then I started to notice that he promoted every sacred and numinous except that of the Bible. He is basically an apologist for paganism – female goddess worship better than that horrible mean male god of the Old testament.
Personally I am glad we moved out of paganism and I would not like to see a return to it. Paganism is irrational and in practice is similar to secular humanism/multiculturalism: “you have your gods, I have my gods, all ideas are equally valid (sorry ET, I know you are a non-relativist humanist anti-multiculturalist)
“The ironic thing is that, as Mark Steyn and other demographers have pointed out, … ”
Ex-liberal, please tell me that you’re not trying to portray Mark Steyn as a social scientist! In fact, does anyone know what Steyn’s educational background is?
” but most are happy not to have to endure constant nagging. The only other critique of Witnesses would be their ”
LOL !!!
the only reason I dont get nagged by jehova rovers is the sign on my front screen door:
“jehova witlesses, moron mormons and door to door salesmen not welcome here”
also, I cant for the life of me (pun intended) fathom how evolutionists of all stripes can claim all existence including we and other self aware life forms happened spontaneously.
to me the fractal like clustering of quarks in an atomic nucleus and the same fractal like distribution all the way up the scale of size to galaxies points to some common thread, an overriding design and control mechanism incalculably beyond chance.
“The ironic thing is that, as Mark Steyn and other demographers have pointed out, … ”
Mark Steyn is theatre critic who has found an audience for his doom stories – an audience with a huge amount of schadenfreude. He’s making quite a good living out of it.
David asks: does anyone know what Steyn’s educational background is? ( You’re going to like this.)
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Steyn
“Steyn was born in Toronto, educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, England, but dropped out of education at 16 and returned to Canada to work as a disc jockey.”
That’s a pretty amazing education. Disc jockey. I bet he got laid a lot, hence the demographic expertise.
I often wonder why the left has never produced any one as clever, insightful and genuinely funny as Mark Steyn. Although they do produce pissant whiners who are too dim to appreciate how good he is, and prove it with glib, obtuse summations.
And just wait for the liberals to start demanding birth control for conservatives
… Greg – I understand your point about the ‘sacred’ (I’m not, not a fan of Joseph Campbell, but..) however, the experience of the sacred can most certainly be found within the sciences.
ET, I know exactly what you mean. I would have a similar reponse to Carl Sagan. Not my area of country, but still …
It would have been interesting for PBS to have rounded up both these guys before their demise. It would have been a very interesting conversation.
Back in the old daysI used to stay up all night with my buddy who was on his way to a PhD in cosmology and relativity. We would have these crazy, but fun conversations.
I appreciate that science can contain the Sacred for scientists and others whose propensities draw them to the sciences. I’ve read Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington.
I also note that out of the many people who post up here, you are the one who conspicuously bothers to try to define what a “God” would have to be in order to be acceptable in the context of a religious discussion.
It is ironic that is takes an atheist to be specific about what qualifications a God would necessarily need to possess.
That includes me. Most of the time when I discuss these issues, my definitions would be in conformity with those of Rudolf Otto. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Otto )
You may be aware that instead of studying ideas about God and religion, Otto studied religious experience.
He added a new vocabulary for thinking about these things: mysterium tremendum, mysterium fascinans, and others. My own interests lean in the direction of experience and philosophy, and as a consequence his research is particularly helpful.
In some ways, Otto’s research bears some similarity to religious experience as it is understood in the East. Needless to say, the East is an invaluable mine for someone thinking along these lines.
However, I have to take heed of Jung’s understanding that India, for example, never really differentiated between psychology and philosophy. He regarded them as utterly brilliant, yet in a pre-Kantian state.
Furthermore, his research into the phenomenology of this kind of experience regarded it as necessary for an ego to exist in order for there to be someone aware of the contents of consciousness. As you know, in the East there is a lot of discussion about the annihilation of the ego, which would be contradictory to psychology as it has developed in the West.
The dimension of religious experience brings us into conundrums relative to the idea of a God transendent and a God immanent.
As Louis Dupre (T. Larson Riggs Professor in the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University) says in Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection, “… but if the transcendent does not in some way enter into experience, phenomenolgy of religion becomes restricted to enter intentions and out expressions… How could a phenomenological analysis ever result in an ‘essential intuition’ of an object that lies beyond experience?
He goes on to discuss these issues: basically, how can transcendence be validated phenomenologically if once the experience is felt, it is already within the realm of immanence,a nd therefore can no longer be considered as trascendental.
It is way too late; I’ve had a busy day and too many cuba libras.
Dx-liberal, my favorite Protestant theologian is Paul Tillich — my favorite Catholic writers are Thomas Merton and Ralph McInerny, philosophy professor at Notre Dame. My favorite philospher is very obscure — Douglas Fawcett. He based a philosphy that put imagination in the place that Hegel would place Reason and Schopenhauer would place Will.
I am familiar with the critcisms of Joseph Campbell that you enumerate. There may be something to this. Campbell was born a Catholic, but quit during his mythological studies. He regarded his master to be Heinrich Zimmer when he was invited to edit Zimmer’s papers. Dr. Zimmer may be the foremost authority on Indian religion and philosophy. He was not really hostile to the Bible, however. It simply was not his area of study. Incidentally, not everyone knows that he was always a Republican throughout his life.
Hi dean juke
“I often wonder why the left has never produced any one as clever, insightful and genuinely funny as Mark Steyn. Although they do produce pissant whiners who are too dim to appreciate how good he is, and prove it with glib, obtuse summations.”
So it’s all about right and left, black and white. One must praise the man or be labelled a miserable bolshevik. He’s a theatre critic and from what I’ve read, a pretty good one. I avoid the theatre myself, but I agree he’s funny.