If you happen to believe that debates should be settled by reason rather than revelation, as I assume many Prospect readers do, you have nothing to fear from the demographic changes facing western society. Eric Kaufmann, like many demographers, talks about categories—in his case, the major category is "religion"—without ever specifying what those categories contain. The moment we look inside the box of religion, we get a very different picture of what is going on than the one Kaufmann presents.
Kaufmann cites the research of Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley and Melissa Wilde, which shows that conservative Protestant denominations are growing at rapid rates in the US. What he neglects to mention is that they offer this data to refute the very trend Kaufmann is trying to identify: growing religious conservatism. It had long been believed that conservative Protestants were expanding their membership because they offered a "strict" faith that stood out in the marketplace, attracting those who wished to return to orthodoxy. But as Hout and Greeley point out in their important new book, The Truth about Conservative Christians, the rise of evangelical denominations in the US owes more to rising birth rates than to increased bible believing. They explicitly reject the conclusion that liberal churches are losing members because of their liberalism, which in turn suggests that conservative churches are not growing because of their conservatism.
In a similar manner, demographic data tends to overlook changes in what religion means to different generations. This is not a matter of "apostasy," or the fact that significant numbers of children "defect" from the Mormonism or Pentecostalism of their parents. True, there are significant such defections, especially among evangelicals, whose leaders regularly lament their failure to prevent younger born-again Christians from concluding that perhaps there is nothing wrong with gay marriage. But there is a particular reason why younger evangelicals do not automatically inherit the faith of their parents: evangelicalism is an inherently unstable faith. The parents of today's twentysomething evangelicals went through a born-again conversion at some point in their lives. Can their children therefore be expected simply to adopt the religion in which they happen to be raised without going through a conversion experience of their own? Evangelicalism is conservative in theology but quite radical in its sense of personal transformation. Since authenticity counts for more than tradition, younger evangelicals feel that they must take their own journey to God, and this does not always lead them to Jesus the same way it did their parents. So even if evangelicalism were to reproduce itself among younger cohorts—which in fact it does not—their form of religion would likely resemble only superficially the sin-obsessed faith of their parents.
Kaufmann overlooks what self-identified religious people actually believe or do. Thus he identifies Spain and Ireland as countries in which "religiosity is still high," when in fact these places are the best examples of the thesis that growing prosperity brings greater secularisation. Spain has gone further to recognise gay marriage than almost any other country in Europe. Attendance at mass in Ireland is rapidly shrinking as Dublin becomes a center of Eurocommerce. If "religiosity" is high in both those countries, then the term has lost all its meaning.
An even better example of the consequences of Kaufmann's methodological flaw is the data he cites from David Voas and Steve Bruce. White people in Britain, he writes to summarise their conclusions, are more likely to call themselves Christian in areas where Muslim populations are high. This is not accurate; if anything, Voas and Bruce show that in areas with Muslim populations of between 5 and 25 per cent of the total, the number of white British respondents who say they are Christian is smaller than elsewhere. What Voas and Bruce were trying to show is that the number of people who call themselves Christian is high given the fact that so few Britons are all that religious by conventional measures such as church attendance. "Christian," they argue, is more an ethnic than a religious category; indeed, Kaufmann acknowledges as much. When he goes on to add that "Christian identity does not equate to growing religious belief, but it eventually might," he leaves demography behind for sheer speculation. Sure, it might. But then again so might Jesus return to earth. People who have stopped going to church are unlikely to start doing so merely because a Pakistani family opens a grocery store on their corner.
Then, finally, there is the question of immigration. On balance, Kaufmann is most likely correct to view immigration as contributing to the religiosity of countries in North America and Europe. Whether they will do so in sufficient numbers to negate the powerful effects of secularisation, however, is another matter. The experience of immigration in the US shows how powerful secularising forces can be; immigrants to America, whatever their religion, eventually become more like the Americans they join. Will Europe be different? I see no reason why it will. Second-generation immigrants in America often become more religious than their parents, only to see their children become less religious than they are. We do not know whether the children of Muslims who are born in Europe will overwhelmingly marry other Muslims and raise their children in the faith. But we do have every reason to believe that culture is as powerful a force as religion, and that the west will transform immigrants even if immigrants transform the west.
