Guest Post

Previously posted on “The Imaginative Conservative”

 

Will The Modernists Inherit The Earth? The Dismal Prospects for Secular Liberalism by Stephen Turley

 

conchitaEverywhere one looks today, it appears that proponents of secular liberalism are celebrating another social victory lap. While eighteen states plus the District of Columbia currently allow so called ‘same-sex marriage,’ the recent Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional may have effectively redefined marriage for the entire country. The first openly gay football player, Michael Sam, has been drafted into the NFL, and the public criticism tweeted subsequently by the Miami Dolphins’ safety Don Jones resulted in a mandatory fine and sensitivity training. The popular social media site Facebook now has over 50 self-identifying gender options, such as ‘gender fluid,’ ‘genderqueer,’ ‘agender,’ and ‘bigender.’ Several states have passed ‘gender neutral’ public restroom laws, and the annual Eurovision Song Contest crowned as its 2014 winner Conchita Wurst, a bearded transvestite.

It is therefore certainly understandable that so many in the media sympathetic with such developments are interpreting these current events as the wave of the future. Christine Brennan of USA Today hails Sam as the most important football player in the nation, while Cyd Zeigler in Time argues that history will look back at his drafting as that moment when professional sports changed forever. And across the pond, the newly crowned Eurovision diva declared to the world: “This night is dedicated to everyone who believes in a future of peace and freedom. You know who you are! We are unity and we are unstoppable!”

However, there are several significant indicators brewing under the surface that demur dramatically from such triumphalistic prognostications, suggesting a considerable gap between the rhetoric and the reality; the future, as it turns out, is actually rather dire for secular liberalism.

According to University of London scholar Eric Kaufmann’s detailed study on global demographic trends, we are in the early stages of nothing less than a demographic revolution. In Kaufmann’s words, “religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world.”[1] There is a significant demographic deficit between secularists and conservative religionists. For example, in the U.S., while self-identified non-religionist women averaged only 1.5 children per couple in 2002, conservative evangelical women averaged 2.5 children, representing a 28 percent fertility edge. Kaufmann notes that this demographic deficit has dramatic effects over time. In a population evenly divided, these numbers indicate that conservative evangelicals would increase from 50 to 62.5 percent of the population in a single generation. In two generations, their number would increase to 73.5 percent, and over the course of 200 years, they would represent 99.4 percent. The Amish and Mormons provide contemporary illustrations of the compound effect of endogamous growth. The Amish double in population every twenty years, and projections have the Amish numbering over a million in the U.S. and Canada in just a few decades. Since 1830, Mormon growth has averaged 40 percent per decade, which means that by 2080, there may be as many as 267 million Mormons in the world, making them by 2100 anywhere from one to six percent of the world’s population.

In Europe, immigration is making the continent more religiously conservative, not less; in fact, London and Paris are some of the most religiously dense areas within their respective populations. In Britain, for example, Ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews constitute only 17 percent of the Jewish population but account for 75 percent of Jewish births. And in Israel, Haredi schoolchildren have gone from comprising a few percent to nearly a third of all Jewish pupils in a matter of five decades, and are poised to represent the majority of the Jewish population by 2050. Since 1970, charismatic Christians in Europe have expanded steadily at a rate of 4 percent per year, in step with Muslim growth. Currently, Laestadian Lutherans in Finland and Holland’s Orthodox Calvinists have a fertility advantage over their wider secular populations of 4:1 and 2:1 respectively.

In contrast, Kaufmann’s data projects that secularists, who consistently exemplify a low fertility rate of around 1.5 (significantly below the replacement level of 2.1), will begin a steady decline after 2030 to a mere 14 to 15 percent of the American population. Similar projections apply to Europe as well. Kaufmann thus appears to have identified what he calls “the soft underbelly of secularism,” namely, demography.[2] This is because secular liberalism entails its own “demographic contradiction,” the affirmation of the sovereign individual devoid of the restraints of classical moral structures necessitates the freedom not to reproduce. The link between sex and procreation having been broken, modernist reproduction translates into mere personal preference. It thus turns out that the radical individualism so celebrated and revered by contemporary secular propagandists is in fact the agent by which their ideology implodes.

Now some may think that this demographic deficit can be compensated for with mass conversions, enticing the children of religious conservatives to break away and join the ranks of the secular. However, this is highly unlikely. The more conservative and vibrant the religious commitment, the more incentives there are for the next generations to remain faithful and concomitantly strong disincentives to leave. With clearly delineated social boundaries and identity markers, conservative endogamous groups are generally very difficult to break up. And Kaufmann’s data suggests that the more conservative the group, the greater the demographic discrepancy as compared with secularist procreation.

Such statistics coalesce with the current population growth in the non-Western world. Indeed, while the West, including Russia and Eastern Europe, comprised 35 percent of the global population at the turn of the last century, it has fallen to 17 percent today and will most likely dwindle further to a mere 10 percent by 2050. And what needs to be understood is that this growing non-Western world asserts its classical religiosity as an indispensible mechanism of social boundary and resistance against what is perceived as the ‘westoxification’ of globalism. In recent years, the West has actually begun to split along the lines of this emerging global culture war. There has been a self-conscious distancing from the West by Russia, drawing inspiration instead from a resurgent neo-Byzantium, what U.S. Naval War College professor John R. Schindler calls a “Third Rome” ideology, which involves “a powerful admixture of Orthodoxy, ethnic mysticism, and Slavophile tendencies that has deep resonance in Russian history.”[3] Along with India, Islamic and African nations, Russia has publically and legislatively rejected what they consider the civilizational suicide of LGBT activism and feminism. Even many Eastern-European countries that feel threatened by Russia’s recent militarism, such as Georgia and Moldova, consider Western secular values far more threatening. Actually, it appears that secular liberalism has a terminus point even within Western and Central Europe, as exemplified by Northern Ireland’s defeat of same-sex ‘marriage’ legislation in May of this year, the third defeat in eighteen months, and Croatia’s national referendum to permanently ban same-sex marriage, which passed by a two-thirds margin.

Moreover, the Western academy appears to have forecasted a gradual turning away from secularism with the advent of so-called ‘post-secular studies.’ It has become increasingly evident that secularism represents a value system that is necessarily constituted by religious processes such as sacred myths, rituals, and theologized law systems, thus undermining its central claim to religious neutrality.[4] In short, post-modernism is morphing into post-secularism: not only are religions resiliently adapting and rearranging themselves in response to secular norms, but the norms themselves are gradually losing their plausibility. The one value system that prohibits the imposition of one’s value systems on others cannot long maintain its monopolization over the public square.

And so, the rhetoric of the secular modernist predicting the inexorable global triumph of the sovereign individual seems little more than a chimera, a pipe dream that is itself the product of self-centered aspirations and ambitions. Since social movements do generally play themselves out, we should expect the next few decades to be characterized by an unprecedented period of cultural degeneration in the West. But by the same token, demographic, global, and academic trends suggest that the dominance of secular liberalism is in fact on the verge of collapse. It does appear that religious conservatives, not secular liberals, will inherent the world after all.

5 Comments on "Guest Post"

  1. Frank Knotts says:

    Let me say that the idea that certain groups will somehow out number other groups in my opinion is a flawed assumption.
    Since we are not simply talking about certain races who procreate faster than others, but are talking about faiths, the idea that simply because a religious fundamentalist has five children, that that equates to five new religious fundamentalist is a leap of faith that is not necessarily going to come to pass.
    One might even say it is nothing more than wishful thinking.

  2. delacrat says:

    Unless a LGBT has or can lay you off, nobody cares about this stuff.

  3. Rick says:

    The West has run it’s course. Look around and you’ll see a civilization in decline.

    Of course, it doesn’t really matter. History shows us that lunatics emerge periodically; unlike previous madmen like Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, Stalin and so on, the next maniac in search of world domination will have nuclear weapons at his disposal, and he will use that. And that will be it.

    Can’t happen? Of course it can and it will.

  4. Evan Queitsch says:

    Continued from above…centered on faith and freedom. Now, does this mean that every child born to a religious family will become one? No. We know that’s unrealistic. However, the tenants of religion will lead others both newborn and reborn to the cause.

  5. Darrel says:

    Fantastic items from you, man. I have have in mind your stuff prior to and you are just too magnificent. I actually like what you have obtained here, certainly like what you’re stating and the best way through which you are saying it. You make it enjoyable and you still take care of to keep it wise. I cant wait to read far more from you. That is actually a great site.

Got something to say? Go for it!