Acceleration of 21st century desecularization

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Desecularization is the process by which religion reasserts its societal influence though religious values, institutions, sectors of society and symbols in reaction to previous and/or co-occurring secularization processes.[1]

The current atheist population mostly resides in East Asia (particularly China) and in secular Europe/Australia primarily among whites.[2] See: Western atheism and race

Current trends, which are covered below, suggests that the growth of global desecularization may accelerate sometime in the 21st century - particularly in the latter half of the 21st century.

Global desecularization

See also: Global atheism

On December 23, 2012, Professor Eric Kaufmann who teaches at Birbeck College, University of London wrote:

I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious.

On the other hand, the secular West and East Asia has very low fertility and a rapidly aging population... In the coming decades, the developed world's demand for workers to pay its pensions and work in its service sector will soar alongside the booming supply of young people in the third world. Ergo, we can expect significant immigration to the secular West which will import religious revival on the back of ethnic change. In addition, those with religious beliefs tend to have higher birth rates than the secular population, with fundamentalists having far larger families. The epicentre of these trends will be in immigration gateway cities like New York (a third white), Amsterdam (half Dutch), Los Angeles (28% white), and London, 45% white British. [3]

At a conference Kaufmann said of religious demographic projections concerning the 21st century:

Part of the reason I think demography is very important, at least if we are going to speak about the future, is that it is the most predictable of the social sciences.

...if you look at a population and its age structure now. You can tell a lot about the future. ...So by looking at the relative age structure of different populations you can already say a lot about the future...

...Religious fundamentalism is going to be on the increase in the future and not just out there in the developing world..., but in the developed world as well.[4]

Global atheism, fertility rates and aging populations

See also: Global atheism and aging populations

Global atheism is facing significant challenges in terms of aging populations in East Asia and Europe and this will be a significant cause of desecularization in the 21st century (see: Global atheism and aging populations).

One of the causes of desecularization is the sub-replacement level of fertility of atheists/agnostics and the high fertility of religious conservatives (See: Atheism and fertility rates).

As atheist populations rise in age, the fertility rates of atheistic countries could drop further. The Rand Corporation indicates, "Nearly all European nations are experiencing long-term downtrends in fertility, and consequently, ageing of their populations. These demographic trends could have potentially damaging consequences for European economies."[5]

Global desecularization and evangelical Christianity

Evangelical Christians are often zealous when it comes to evangelism and evangelical Christianity has seen rapid growth in the world (see: Growth of evangelical Christianity).

Decline of Asian atheism

See also: Asian atheism and East Asia and global desecularization and Growth of Christianity in China and Asian Century

In front of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

According to Slate, "Protestant Christianity has been the fastest growing religion in China."[6] Evangelical Christianity is especially growing sharply in China.[7]

On November 1, 2014, an article in The Economist entitled Cracks in the atheist edifice declared:

Officials are untroubled by the clash between the city’s famously freewheeling capitalism and the Communist Party’s ideology, yet still see religion and its symbols as affronts to the party’s atheism...

Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China’s Christian population the largest in the world. Mr. Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire.[8]

Justin Wood also wrote:

Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by ...veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world's largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history...

I suspect that even the most enthusiastic accounts err on the downside, and that Christianity will have become a Sino-centric religion two generations from now. China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East.[9]

Desecularization and Europe

See also: European atheism and 21st century decline and Multiculturism and European desecularization

Concerning the future of religion/secularism in Europe, Eric Kaufmann wrote:

We have performed these unprecedented analyses on several cases. Austria offers us a window into what the future holds. Its census question on religious affiliation permits us to perform cohort component projections, which show the secular population plateauing by 2050, or as early as 2021 if secularism fails to attract lapsed Christians and new Muslim immigrants at the same rate as it has in the past. (Goujon, Skirbekk et al. 2006).

This task will arguably become far more difficult as the supply of nominal Christians dries up while more secularisation-resistant Muslims and committed rump Christians comprise an increasing share of the population.[10]

Immigration to the European continent has a long history. In the latter part of the 20th century, immigration to Europe increased substantially - especially in Western Europe. At the same time, in 2014, the Pew Research Forum indicated that Europe will go from 11% of the world's population to 7% of the world's population by 2050.[11] See: Growth of global desecularization

Concerning the future of evangelical Protestantism in Europe, in a paper entitled Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, Kaufmann wrote:

What of European Christianity? The conventional wisdom holds it to be in free fall, especially in Western Europe. (Bruce 2002) This is undoubtedly correct for Catholic Europe, while Protestant Europe already has low levels of religious practice. Yet closer scrutiny reveals an increasingly lively and demographically growing Christian remnant. Several studies have examined the connection between religiosity - whether defined as attendance, belief or affiliation - and fertility in Europe. Most find a statistically significant effect even when controlling for age, education, income, marital status and other factors...

Moving to the wider spectrum of European Christianity, we find that fertility is indeed much higher among European women who are religious...

Today, most of those who remain religious in Europe wear their beliefs lightly, but conservative Christianity is hardly a spent force. Data on conservative Christians is difficult to come by since many new churches keep few official records. Reports from the World Christian Database, which meticulously tracks reports from church bodies, indicates that 4.1 percent of Europeans (including Russians) were evangelical Christians in 2005. This figure rises to 4.9 percent in northern, western and southern Europe. Most religious conservatives are charismatics, working within mainstream denominations like Catholicism or Lutheranism to ‘renew’ the faith along more conservative lines. There is also an important minority of Pentecostals, who account for .5% of Europe’s population. Together, charismatics and Pentecostals account for close to 5 % of Europe’s population. The proportion of conservative Christians has been rising, however: some estimate that the trajectory of conservative Christian growth has outpaced that of Islam in Europe. (Jenkins 2007: 75).

In many European countries, the proportion of conservative Christians is close to the number who are recorded as attending church weekly. This would suggest an increasingly devout Christian remnant is emerging in western Europe which is more resistant to secularization. This shows up in France, Britain and Scandinavia (less Finland), the most secular countries where we have 1981, 1990 and 2000 EVS and 2004 ESS data on religiosity...

Currently there are more evangelical Christians than Muslims in Europe. (Jenkins 2007: 75) In Eastern Europe, as outside the western world, Pentecostalism is a sociological and not a demographic phenomenon. In Western Europe, by contrast, demography is central to evangelicalism’s growth, especially in urban areas. Alas, immigration brings two foreign imports, Islam and Christianity, to secular Europe.[12]

Atheists/agnostics in the Western World have historically not engaged in personal evangelism as far as racial minorities in their countries (see: Western atheism and race and Atheism and apathy).

Yale Daily News reported in an article entitled White Europeans: An endangered species? that "Without a major shift in the current fertility trends, industrialized Europe will see its native population decline by about three-fourths over the 21st century."[13] See also: Decline of global atheism and Global Christianity

See also:

Growth of underlying factors related to desecularization

There are a number of factors which cause desecularization (see: Causes of desecularization).

Some of these factors like the weakening of state atheism may accelerate (see also: Collapse of atheism in the former Soviet Union).

Weakening of state atheism

The historian Martin Van Crevel points out that sovereign states are losing power/influence due to technology democratizing access to information, welfare states increasingly failing, fourth-generation warfare being waged against countries and sovereign states increasingly losing their ability to maintain internal order.[14][15]

Atheist indoctrination facing future challenges

Dennis Prager is a vocal opponent of atheist indoctrination in public schools.[16]

Jewish columnist Dennis Prager has stated that a causal factor of atheism is the "secular indoctrination of a generation."[17] Prager stated that "From elementary school through graduate school, only one way of looking at the world – the secular – is presented. The typical individual in the Western world receives as secular an indoctrination as the typical European received a religious one in the Middle Ages."[18] See also: Atheism and critical thinking

Homeschooling is growing worldwide.[19]

Nearly 7% of American college-educated parents homeschool their children.[20] In the United States, an estimated one to two million students are homeschooled, or nearly one out of every 30 students.[21]

In 2011, it was reported that homeschooling has grown by almost 75% in the last 8 years in the United States.[22] and in a recent survey "the average homeschooled student scored at the 88th percentile" in the core subjects of reading, language and math.[23] The most successful mathematician in contests in history, Reid Barton, was homeschooled.[24]

Aging populations under financial pressure and lower per pupil cost of private schooling

Private schooling per student cost less than public schooling.[25]

According to a news program by John Stossel, Belgium has a school system which funds students to attend primary and secondary schools and they can use those funds to attend any school or their choice whether it be a religious private school, a non-religious private school or a public school.

American government run public schools are increasingly facing budget cuts and there is growing criticism of public schools. Vouchers for private schools (including religious schools) and charter schools are increasingly being discussed and legislators are introducing and passing school choice bills.[26] America also has an aging population and Bill Gates indicates that state budgets are breaking schools in the United States.[27] Of course, constrained public school budgets includes constrained school legal budgets so many schools will be less able to engage in frivolous/unwarranted legal suits constraining religious free speech in their schools.

There appears to be a higher education bubble that will burst.[28] The Wall Street Journal reported in 2013 that the percentage of Americans going to college has been decreasing for 3 years in the USA.[29]

Europe faces an aging population and will also have challenges financing public schools.

Pessimism and various atheists/agnostics about recent history of secularism and/or future of secularism

See also: Atheists and the endurance of religion and Atheist pessimism about the atheist movement

In 2011, atheist Jacques Berlinerblau declared: "The Golden Age of Secularism has passed."[30]

Groups/organizations which unsuccessfully meet challenges and/or face future challenges which they believe they cannot successfully overcome, often become dispirited, pessimistic and less effective.

The agnostic Eric Kaufmann wrote in 2010:

Worldwide, the march of religion can probably only be reversed by a renewed, self-aware secularism. Today, it appears exhausted and lacking in confidence... Secularism's greatest triumphs owe less to science than to popular social movements like nationalism, socialism and 1960s anarchist-liberalism. Ironically, secularism's demographic deficit means that it will probably only succeed in the twenty-first century if it can create a secular form of 'religious' enthusiasm." [31]

In 2011, atheist Jacques Berlinerblau declared: "The Golden Age of Secularism has passed."[32]

In 2015, the atheist author Joshua Kelly wrote:

...since the death of Hitchens: angry atheism lost its most charismatic champion. Call it what you like: New Atheism, fire-brand atheism, etc., had a surge with the Four Horsemen in the middle of the last decade and in the last four years has generally peetered out to a kind that is more docile, politically correct, and even apologetic.[33]

The American atheist activist Eddie Tabash said at the 2010 Michigan Atheists State Convention:

In every generation there has been a promising beginning of a true vanguard movement that will finally achieve widespread public acceptance for nonbelief. Yet, in each generation there has been an ultimately disappointing failure to actually register the naturalistic alternative to supernatural claims in the public consciousness...

Now given the confounding extent to which religion is entrenched in our society, it could take a minimum of 100 years of sustained, intense effort to even begin to cut into the current monolithic stranglehold that religion has on American mass culture, [34]

Tabash said in a 2007 speech to the Atheist Alliance International organization:

The other likely future is one in which by a shift of only one vote on the United States Supreme Court, we will essentially become a theocracy in which all branches of government we be freed to favor religion collectively over nonbelief.[35]


In 2013, atheist PZ Myers declared:

If we're going to expand our base and we're going to draw in more people to recognize the virtues of living in a secular world, we need to appeal to more than just that geek and nerd subset of the population. We need to have a wider base. ...I seriously believe that we're on the cusp of a crisis. We're not there yet but it's looming in front of us. Will we adapt and thrive and change the world? Or will we remain an avocation for a prosperous and largely irrelevant subset of the population? Will we become something more than a scattered society of internet nerds? That's what we have to do.[36]

In response, Evolution News and Views wrote:

A crisis looms, in Myers's view, because he looks around himself and sees a not very promising basis for a mass movement. He's right. There is indeed a quality of geeky isolation from reality, common sense, and the fullness of life that I see as a motif in atheist and Darwin activism alike.[37]

External links

Notes

  1. Religion and the State in Russia and China: Suppression, Survival and Revival by Christopher Marsh, 2011, page 11 (Christopher Marsh cites the definitions of desecularization given by Peter L. Berger and Vyacheslav Karpov)
  2. A surprising map of where the world’s atheists live, By Max Fisher and Caitlin Dewey, Washington Post, May 23, 2013
  3. 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious, Tuesday, April 30, 2013
  4. Eric Kaufmann - Religion, Demography and Politics in the 21st Century
  5. Low Fertility and Population Ageing, Rand Corporation
  6. When Will China Become the World’s Largest Christian Country?, Slate
  7. In China, a church-state showdown of biblical proportions
  8. Cracks in the atheist edifice, The Economist, November 1, 2014
  9. Christianity Finds a Fulcrum in Asia by Justin Wood
  10. Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century by Eric Kaufmann
  11. Kochhar, Rakesh (February 3, 2014). "10 projections for the global population in 2050". FactTank/Pew Research Center website.
  12. Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century by Eric Kaufmann
  13. White Europeans: An endangered species? By Trevor Wagener, Yale Daily News, February 27, 2008
  14. The Fate of the State by MARTIN VAN CREVELD
  15. Martin van Creveld interview
  16. How atheism is being sold in America
  17. How atheism is being sold in America
  18. How atheism is being sold in America
  19. Homeschooling is growing worldwide
  20. http://www.sagus.us/blog/blog_details.asp?ID=18&p=7&s=7&s2=7
  21. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-01-04-homeschooling_N.htm
  22. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/02/09/educating-children-evolution-home-schooling
  23. http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/washingtontimes/200908100.asp
  24. http://www.amstat.org/PUBLICATIONS/amsn/index.cfm?fuseaction=highlights0812001
  25. Anti-evolution religious private schooling and homeschooling will see big growth worldwide
  26. Bill Gates: How state budgets are breaking US schools
  27. College enrollment shows signs of slowing which means less post high school evolutionary indoctrination. Also, the ever shrinking role of tenured evolutionist professors and evolutionary biologists
  28. Berlinerblau, Jacques (February 4, 2011). "Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast". The Chronicle of Higher Education/Brainstorm blog. Retrieved on May 29, 2015.
  29. Shall the religious inherit the earth? - Eric Kaufmann
  30. Berlinerblau, Jacques (February 4, 2011). "Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast". The Chronicle of Higher Education/Brainstorm blog. Retrieved on May 29, 2015.
  31. Uproar Against Dawkins Is Sign of New Atheism Retrogression by Joshua Kelly
  32. Atheists Speak Up - Eddie Tabash
  33. Eddie Tabash: Speech and Q&A at AAI 07
  34. in Seattle, PZ Myers Reflects Candidly on His Constituency
  35. in Seattle, PZ Myers Reflects Candidly on His Constituency