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Line 101: − [[Demography]] is the study of human populations, and is a major specialty in the disciplines of sociology, economics, history, geography, statistics and epidemiology.+ Line 130:
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→Potential global demographic crisis
"There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe the defining challenge of the 21st century will be [[Global warming|climate change]], and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the population bust, the old age of the world." - Ross Douthat, token [[conservative]] at the ''[[New York Times]]''.<ref>[https://www.mercatornet.com/which_is_more_frightening_global_warming_or_demographic_winter Which is more frightening: global warming or demographic winter?] by LOUIS T. MARCH</ref>
"There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who believe the defining challenge of the 21st century will be [[Global warming|climate change]], and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the population bust, the old age of the world." - Ross Douthat, token [[conservative]] at the ''[[New York Times]]''.<ref>[https://www.mercatornet.com/which_is_more_frightening_global_warming_or_demographic_winter Which is more frightening: global warming or demographic winter?] by LOUIS T. MARCH</ref>
Demography is the study of human populations, and is a major specialty in the disciplines of sociology, economics, history, geography, statistics and epidemiology.
There have been some excellent works published about an impending demographic winter due to subreplacement fertility rates in many countries and the falling fertility rates in countries with replacement levels of births per woman which is 2.1 births per woman.<ref>
There have been some excellent works published about an impending demographic winter due to subreplacement fertility rates in many countries and the falling fertility rates in countries with replacement levels of births per woman which is 2.1 births per woman.<ref>
[[File:Population projection 2022.png|thumbnail|center|2200px|2022 United Nations world population projections to 2100 with confidence level information.]]
[[File:Population projection 2022.png|thumbnail|center|2200px|2022 United Nations world population projections to 2100 with confidence level information.]]
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=== Committed literalist religious populations with above average fertility rates ===
''See also:'' [[Desecularization]] and [[Growth of religious fundamentalism]] and [[Atheism and fertility rates]]
Professor [[Eric Kaufmann]], who teaches at [[Birkbeck College, University of London]], specializes in the academic area of how [[demography|demographic]] changes affect religion/irreligion and politics.
Eric Kaufmann, in his academic paper ''Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century'' wrote:
{{Cquote|The late Ernest Gellner, a prominent theorist of nationalism, coined the term 'counter-entropic' to describe the traits which help prevent ethnic minorities from being washed away by assimilation. Certainly race, once viewed as an insuperable barrier, is nothing of the kind, having been strongly breached by intermarriage in the late twentieth century. The case is different with religion. Gellner cited religion as the archetypal counter-entropic trait, and was thinking of the Jews of Europe. Jewish religious practice varies immensely, of course, and many Jews were open to secularisation and, eventually, mixed marriage. But literalist religion is a much tougher adversary. Ethnicity and race may succumb to liberal modernity, but committed religious populations cannot be assimilated to liberal secularism fast enough to compensate for their demographic advantage in a world of plunging fertility and growing migration. In the end, it is a battle between religious fertility on the one hand, and, on the other, religious decline through the 'assimilation' of religious offspring into secularism. This paper argues that the weakness of secularism and a widening secular-religious fertility gap points toward a religious victory.
The population declinists have a powerful point, but human population will not dwindle to zero, precisely because of the 'counter-entropic' religiously-committed populations whose fertility remains above replacement even in societies experiencing general population decline. The water table may be falling, but there are important religious wellsprings, and these will become increasingly apparent. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, whether in Israel, Europe or North America, have a two or threefold fertility advantage over their liberal-Jewish counterparts. Their eventual achievement of majority status within worldwide Jewry in the twenty-first century seems certain. Evangelical and neotraditional Christians in the [[United States]] and, increasingly, in [[Europe]] will follow suit.<ref>[https://www.sneps.net/RD/uploads/1-Shall%20the%20Religious%20Inherit%20the%20Earth.pdf Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century] by Eric Kaufmann, 2011</ref>}}
[[File:Eric Kaufmann.jpg|right|thumbnail|400px|"I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious."- [[Eric Kaufmann]]<ref>[https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/eric-kaufmann/london-a-rising-island-of-religion_b_2336699.html London: A Rising Island of Religion in a Secular Sea] by Eric Kaufmann, ''Huffington Post'', 2012</ref> ]]
On December 23, 2012, Kaufmann wrote:
{{cquote|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.<ref>[https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/eric-kaufmann/london-a-rising-island-of-religion_b_2336699.html London: A Rising Island of Religion in a Secular Sea] by Eric Kaufmann, ''Huffington Post'', 2012</ref>
<ref>[http://questionevolution.blogspot.com/2013/04/97-of-worlds-population-growth-is.html 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious], Tuesday, April 30, 2013</ref>}}
Regarding the [[Western World]] as a whole and the growth of the religious population in the West, Kaufmann wrote:
{{Cquote|...this paper claims that the developing world will not only never catch up, but that, ironically, it is the West which will increasingly come to resemble the developing world. Committed religious populations are growing in the West, and will reverse the march of secularism before 2050. The logic which is driving this apparently anti-modern development is [[demography]], a shadowy historical force whose power multiplies exponentially with the modernisation process. Demography is about raw numbers, and, in an age of low mortality, its chief components are fertility and migration.<ref>[http://www.sneps.net/RD/uploads/1-Shall%20the%20Religious%20Inherit%20the%20Earth.pdf ''Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century'' by Eric Kaufmann]</ref>}}
A study conducted by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life says that [[Africa]]ns are among the most religious people on Earth.<ref name="ffrf.org">[http://ffrf.org/outreach/item/13652-why-so-many-africans-are-religious Why so many Africans are religious: Leo Igwe]</ref> Africa has a high fertility rate and it is seeing a big population boom. According to the Institute For Security Studies: "Africa's population is the fastest growing in the world. It is expected to increase by roughly 50% over the next 18 years, growing from 1.2 billion people today to over 1.8 billion in 2035. In fact, Africa will account for nearly half of global population growth over the next two decades."<ref>[https://issafrica.org/amp/iss-today/africas-population-boom-burden-or-opportunity#:~:text=Africa's%20population%20is%20the%20fastest,decades%20(see%20Figure%201). Africa’s population boom: burden or opportunity?], Institute For Security Studies</ref> See: [[Religion and Africa]]
At a conference Kaufmann said of religious demographic projections concerning the 21st century:
{{cquote|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.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7vCDeKPRSo Eric Kaufmann - Religion, Demography and Politics in the 21st Century]</ref>}}
See also: [[Religion and migration]] and [[Growth of religious fundamentalism]]
[[File:Steve Turley.jpeg|left|thumb|250px|[[Steve Turley]]]]
Dr. [[Steve Turley]] wrote:
{{Cquote|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." 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 [[Lutheranism|Lutheran]]s 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. 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.<ref>(source: Text below the YouTube video ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O2bsh6oHnM Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth''] and the text was written by Dr. Steven Turley).</ref>}}
==== Videos on religious fertility rates and its effect on the world ====
*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVqO63fcMCs Why the Religious Will inherit the Earth - by Eric Kaufmann]
*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7vCDeKPRSo Eric Kaufmann - Religion, Demography and Politics in the 21st Century]
==Mortality==
==Mortality==