The secular mindset is dead set that its agenda will rule the future, but its agenda includes having almost no children. It never occurred to them that, without children, their agenda has no future.

Eric Kaufmann in a recent article in Prospect Magazine entitled "Breeding for God" drives this all too obvious point home.

"In Europe, the fertility advantage of the religious over non-believers has historically been counterbalanced by the march of secularization." But no longer. Not in Europe; not in the world. "The share of the world's population that is religious is growing, after nearly a century of modest decline. This effect has been produced in the younger generations in the developing world rejecting secularization, combined with higher religious fertility levels. Throughout the world, the religious tend to have more children, irrespective of age, education or wealth."

Note the shocker (at least in regard to the unquestioned assumptions of secular faith): "irrespective of age, education or wealth."

Secular faith tied together three unquestioned components of its creed: the young will always side with progress (and progress means secularization); religion is irrational therefore education will necessarily cause enlightenment (i.e., the acceptance of secularism); and poverty makes people credulous (and therefore prone to religion) and prone to overbreeding (because they have not been enlightened, especially about birth control). Therefore, with the advance of education and prosperity, secularization must increase as religion decreases.

But now it is the young, the educated, and the well-off who are becoming more religious. And they are breeding at an alarming rate.

Alarming to secularists, that is. But what can they do? Essential to their creed is that education brings enlightenment. It never occurred to them that—Oh, how did this happen?! Who was sleeping on his/her watch?!—their children might encounter cogently-reasoned, profound critiques of secularism, and equally cogent and profound arguments for religious faith. And then, horrors or horrors!, turn to fruitful multiplication.

What to do? One form of secular denial is simply to see the whole thing as a breeding takeover by irrational, radical Muslims. But that is not even a half-truth. Certainly the Muslim population of Europe is out-breeding the aging white population of old Europeans at an alarming rate (alarming to secularists, that is). But as we have argued in previous emails, while there are radical Muslims, most Muslims are not out to bomb non-Muslims. They are quite well-educated, rational human beings who are intellectually and morally repulsed at decadent secular western culture.

But it just ain't so that this phenomenon is confined to Muslims. Evangelicals in both America and Europe and quite well educated and well-off financially. And they are having children. That accounts for the interesting "fertility advantage" that religious "red" states have over the liberal "blue" states in recent US elections. As Arthur Brooks at Syracuse University made startlingly clear: "if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That's a 'fertility gap' of 41 per cent." And again, do the math yourself. In a generation the gap will have been geometrically widened.

Demography in democracy is political destiny, be it in America, in Europe, or anywhere in the world. The future belongs to those who go forth and multiply.

This Week's TIME Cover Article Concludes Right Should Re-emphasize the Importance of the Family

And where will those new ideas and leaders come from? In this magazine, conservative columnist William Kristol has cited two possible sources, both of which focus on the very middle-class voters that Reagan so successfully peeled away from their Democratic moorings. In a forthcoming book, conservative authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam identify these voters as "Sam's Club Republicans," who could benefit from market-friendly health-care and tax policies that are aimed at families and especially at at-home parents. Another conservative thinker, Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues along a similar vein with a set of policy proposals that he calls "Putting Parents First." Bush's signature approach to domestic policy fell short in that regard, Levin wrote in the Weekly Standard. "Compassionate conservatism, for all its virtues, does not even try to address itself to parents. A conservative agenda that did so would not only cement a relationship with these voters, it would also appeal to many with similar worries who do not share the strong cultural predilections that have drawn middle- and lower-middle-class parents to vote for Republicans."

The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper "De Volkskrant" (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now.

Paul Belien

Canadian Birth Rates Trail Those of the More Religious United States

Phil Morgan, a sociologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., agrees that the Hispanic and teen fertility rate do pull up the U.S. average, but they alone don't account for the difference.

"When people try to get around high U.S. fertility with those kinds of explanations, I think they're missing it," Morgan says. "Because if you took white, college-educated women in the U.S., they have a fertility rate that's . . . about 1.65, 1.7 kids."

"There's something about the U.S. that's different."

Many experts believe that what sets the U.S. apart from Canada and other developed countries is its level of "religiosity."

Loosely defined, religiosity is a propensity to have faith in God and to attend a house of worship. But it also tends to include sticking to a traditional family structure, with men as the breadwinning head of household and women primarily as nurturers of children.

"People suspect that this issue of the U.S. being more religious than Canada may have something to do with the differences in fertility rate," says Prof. Nathan Lauster of the Social Work and Family Studies program at the University of British Columbia.

"There are a variety of reasons why it might have an impact on fertility," says Lauster. "Some of that may be more cultural than anything else, it might be something about how people think they're supposed to act in life, which is influenced by their religious upbringing or by the group of people that they get their ideas from about what family life should be like."

Morgan of Duke University is about to publish a study on religiosity, in which Americans were asked a number of questions, including the value they place on religion - from very important to their lives, to somewhat important, to not at all.

"The difference between not at all and very important is a whole kid," he said of the correlation between religiosity and birth rates. "So it's huge."

cnews

In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared "humanist") author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder's interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like "a process of mourning." He is overwhelmed by a "feeling of sadness." "I am not a warrior," he says, "but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."

Paul Belien

Send your letter to the editor to feedback@tothesource.org.