European desecularization in the 21st century

Austria's census data permits demographers to perform analysis which indicates the secular population plateauing by 2050, or as early as 2021.

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

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.

Both Europe and Asia are expected to see a period of desecularization in the 21st century (see: Desecularization and Asia).

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

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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." See also: Decline of global atheism and Global Christianity

Future of Islam in Europe and the desecularization of Europe

According to Pew Forum, by 2030 Muslims are projected to make up 8% of Europe’s population.

See also: Atheism vs. Islam

According to Pew Forum:

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In recent decades, the Muslim share of the population throughout Europe grew about 1 percentage point a decade, from 4% in 1990 to 6% in 2010. This pattern is expected to continue through 2030, when Muslims are projected to make up 8% of Europe’s population.

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Professor Philip Jenkins at Penn State University projects that by 2100, Muslims will be about 25% of Europe's population. Jenkins indicates that this figure does not take account divergent birthrates amongst Europe's various immigrant Christians.

In April of 2010, Eric Kaufmann indicated concerning the future of Islam in Europe:

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I address this in some detail in the book, as well is in a recent article in the April issue of Prospect magazine here in Britain. The short answer is that I don’t foresee a Muslim-majority Europe in this century or in the next. Why? Mainly because Muslim birthrates are plunging both in Europe and the Muslim world. Already, Iran, Tunisia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and several other Muslim countries have replacement-level fertility or below. In the UK, Bangladeshi and Pakistani fertility has halved in a generation and is now under 3 children per woman. This means their long-term growth will begin to tail off. The other part of the equation is the rise of non-Muslim immigrant groups (African and West Indian Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other Eastern faiths) who are also increasing and therefore making Europe more plural and, in the process, rendering it harder for Muslims to increase their share of the population. That said, Muslim membership retention and in-group marriage is exceptionally high (over 90 per cent) and they are a much younger population than the host society. So they are on course for steady growth. My colleagues and I expect their fertility to fall to host levels by 2030, but they will still make up 5-15 per cent of most West European countries by 2050 and 10-25 per cent by 2100. This is a major change from the 2-6 per cent levels of today

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Investor's Business Daily on the flood of Muslim immigrants to Europe

Investor's Business Daily wrote in 2015 concerning a flood of Muslim immigrants to the European Union:

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The European Union is bracing for as many as 800,000 mostly Muslim refugees arriving from the chaos in the Middle East this year, mainly Syria, Iraq and Eritrea. And it may be just the beginning. Can the EU withstand such a religio-demographic earthquake? Its failure to enforce any concept of borders isn't a good sign.... Assimilation offers little hope. Parts of France — especially its notorious banlieues outside major cities like Paris — are virtual no-go zones. London's are little better. Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia all have large, unassimilated Muslim populations. Those populations are growing. Europe isn't. As far back as 2011, the Pew Forum noted that Europe's Muslim population was expected to almost double from 30 million in 1990 to 57 million in 2030. That's surely now an underestimate. Add to this the inevitability of jihadists slipping across porous EU borders, and Europe is in deep trouble. Anger is welling up, and nationalist parties are spreading across the Continent. As 20th century history showed, Europe doesn't react well to social upheaval. Can Europe survive the coming storm? Doubtful.

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Growth of French evangelical Protestant Christianity

French scholars say, evangelicalism is likely the fastest-growing religion in France – defying all stereotypes about one of Europe’s most secular nations. In 2011, The number of evangelical churches increased from 769 to 2,068 in 2011.

On July 12, 2012, the Christian Science Monitor reported:

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French scholars say, evangelicalism is likely the fastest-growing religion in France – defying all stereotypes about Europe’s most secular nation... Daniel Liechti, vice-president of the French National Evangelical Council, found that since 1970, a new evangelical church has opened in France every 10 days. The number of churches increased from 769 to 2,068 last year.

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See also: Immigrant evangelical churches are a fast growing movement in France

Growth of British evangelical Christianity

Some 4.5million of the UK's foreign-born population claim to have a religious affiliation and more than half are Christian.

Church attendance in Greater London grew by 16% between 2005 and 2012. In addition, the latest immigrants to the UK as a whole mean British Christianity is becoming more charismatic and fundamentalist.

See also: British atheism

Due to religious immigrants, many of whom are evangelical Christians, church attendance in Greater London grew by 16% between 2005 and 2012. In 2013, it was reported that 52% of people who attended church in London attended evangelical churches.

On December 14th, 2009, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported:

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According to the Mail Evangelical Christianity is on the rise. Some 4.5million of the UK's foreign-born population claim to have a religious affiliation. Of these, around a quarter are Muslim while more than half are Christian – with Polish Catholics and African Pentecostals among the fastest-growing groups. While traditional churchgoing is on the decline in the UK over the past decade, the latest immigrants mean Christianity is becoming more charismatic and fundamentalist. 'Perhaps the most significant change has been the growth of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity within migrant populations, particularly those from Africa and Latin America,' the report found. 'In Lewisham, there are 65 Pentecostal churches serving the Nigerian community, and others serving the Congolese, Ghanaian and Ivorian communities.' Professor Mike Kenny of IPPR said: 'The research shows that recent waves of inward migration have given a boost to some of the UK's established faith communities at a time when Britain's society and culture are generally more secular, and smaller numbers of the indigenous population are regularly attending churches. 'Recent migration trends are altering the faith map of the UK. Their biggest impact is being felt in some of our largest cities: London above all, where a rich mosaic of different faith communities has come into being.' Evangelical Christianity might be heavily African-influenced but it’s also spreading among the natives as well.

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See also:

• Biblical Christianity is rising in the UK

• Pentecostalism Invades Lambeth Palace by Peter Berger

Germany and the growth of evangelical Christianity

See also: Secular Europe

On March 17, 2014, the news website Deutsche Well reported that evangelical Christianity has doubled in Germany in the last 10 years.

Signs pointing to reversal of secularism in the UK later in the 21st century

Many of the religious immigrants to the UK are non-white immigrants. In the United Kingdom, by the year 2050, 30 percent of the population is expected to be non-white. As noted above, 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."

There are a number of other indications that secularization in Britain will reverse itself sometimes in the 21st century (see: Signs pointing towards a decline of British atheism in the 21st century).

Multiculturism and European desecularization

See also: Multiculturism and European desecularization

In the Europe of tomorrow, immigration and religious fertility will increase the proportion of committed Christians in Europe, many from the developing world.

Kaufmann in an academic paper entitled Shall the Righteous Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century wrote:

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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 principle of tolerating and 'celebrating' diversity is a corollary of postmodern relativism which opens up space for antimodern religious 'diversities' to take root. If they are demographically-powerful religious movements like Islamism or evangelical Christianity, they will exploit this weakness to progressively erode the hegemony of western secular humanism.... In the Europe of tomorrow, immigration and religious fertility will increase the proportion of committed Muslims and Christians, many from the developing world. It may seem fanciful to imagine a moral conservatism uniting white and nonwhite Christians as well as Muslims against 'secular humanists'. However, a version of this process has occurred in the United States, and it can be argued that the cocktail of cultural relativism, secular exhaustion and demographic change is even more potent in Europe than America. The division between native ethnic groups and immigrant groups is currently more important in Europe, but as the Muslim and religious Christian minorities grow, they will become as important for conservative politicians as the religious Hispanics of America whom the Republicans have so assiduously courted. At some point, it will make more electoral sense for European conservatives to appeal to a trans-ethnic coalition of moral conservatives than it will to stress anti-immigrant themes and ethno-nationalism. The liberal-left will find it extremely difficult to craft a defense of secularism given its investment in cultural relativism, the exhaustion of its secular religions, and its laissez-faire attitude to demographic change. Standing back from the fray, we can think of demography as the achilles heel of liberalism.

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Religious immigrants to Europe resistant to secularization

Conservative Protestants have relatively high fertility rates. (Picture: Protestant church pulpit in Europe)

See also: Desecularization and Growth of global desecularization and Religious immigrants and atheist indoctrination

In 2011, a paper was published entitled The End of Secularization in Europe?: A Socio-Demographic Perspective. The authors of the paper were: Eric Kaufmann - Birkbeck College, University of London; Anne Goujon - World Population Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA); Vegard Skirbekk World Population Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

An excerpt from the paper by Kaufmann, Goujon and Skirbekk:

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Conservative Protestants, a much larger group than the Mormons, also benefit from relatively high fertility. Hout et al. (2001) find that three-quarters of the growth of conservative Protestant denominations against their liberal counterparts is due to fertility advantage rather than conversion. In Europe, there has been less attention paid to fertility differences between denominations. However, several studies have discovered that immigrants to Europe tend to be more religious than the host population and — especially if Muslim—tend to retain their religiosity (Van Tubergen 2006). Though some indicators point to modest religious decline toward the host society mean, other trends suggest that immigrants become more, rather than less, religious the longer they reside in the host society (Van Tubergen 2007). All of which indicates that religious decline may fail at the aggregate level even if it is occurring at the individual level (Kaufmann 2006, 2010). This article thereby investigates the hypothesis that a combination of higher religious fertility, immigration, and slowing rates of religious apostasy will eventually produce a reversal in the decline of the religious population of Western Europe.

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In 2010, Kaufmann reported that the rate of secularisation flattened to zero in most of Protestant Europe and France.

For additional information, please see: Growth of global desecularization

Islamic creationism and resistance to assimilation

In recent years Britain, the birth place of Darwinism, has seen a large influx of Muslim immigrants. Most religious Muslims are creationists. In the UK, between the years 2001 and 2009 the Muslim population increased nearly 10 times faster than the non-Muslim population. See also: Islam and belief in creationism

The British newspaper The Telegraph reported in an article entitled Richard Dawkins: Muslim parents 'import creationism' into schools:

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Prof Dawkins, a well-known atheist, also blamed the Government for accommodating religious views and allowing creationism to be taught in schools. "Most devout Muslims are creationists so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught," Prof Dawkins said in a Sunday newspaper interview. "Teachers are bending over backwards to respect home prejudices that children have been brought up with. The Government could do more, but it doesn't want to because it is fanatical about multiculturalism and the need to respect the different traditions from which these children come."

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Illegal immigrants and Europe

Legal and illegal immigration of religious immigrants to Western World nations is a source of desecularization.

As far as illegal immigration to Europe, The American Interest website declares:

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Securing Europe’s vast land and sea borders—a task greater than that faced by the United States along its border with Mexico—is proving exceptionally challenging for the European Union (EU).... Traffickers use small boats to reduce the chances of being picked up by patrol boats’ radars; migrants are often dropped off on stretches of inaccessible coastline, or left to drift ashore. In the case of illegal land crossings, small trucks are used to penetrate the most porous parts of eastern or southern Europe’s borders. Penalties for this are low or non-existent all around Europe, and traffickers are rarely caught anyway. Smuggling people across Europe has become easier and more profitable than anything other criminal activity, including drugs.

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See also

• Desecularization and Asia

• Growth of global desecularization

• Acceleration of 21st century desecularization

• Causes of desecularization