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A Dying Creed? The Demographic Contradictions of Liberal Capitalism [project complete]
Project LinksOther Projects in This Theme:
External Links:  ResearchersAbstract:This proposal aims to test the thesis that the population of the developed world will become increasingly religious and conservative in the long-term, reversing decades - even centuries - of liberal secularisation. There will be no mass conversions or sudden shifts in the cultural mood. Instead, religiosity will spread largely through demographic advantage. An analogy may be drawn with early Christianity, which grew from some 40 converts in 30 C.E. to over 6 million adherents in 300 C.E. Religious sociologist Rodney Stark claims that an important component of this growth came from Christians’ mortality advantage over pagans. This allowed Christians to maintain a population growth rate of 40 percent per decade. Coincidentally, the Mormon church in the United States has managed to grow - through higher fertility rather than lower mortality - at the 40 percent rate for the past century, thus retaining its 70 percent share of Utah’s population in the face of large-scale non-Mormon in-migration. A similar dynamic enabled the descendants of 5-10,000 17th century French settlers to expand to over 8 million French-Canadians and thereby retain their demographic position in the face of rapid British immigration in the 1815-1930 period. And were it not for the high fertility of evangelical Protestants in the United States, white American secularisation, fertility and voting patterns would be a great deal more similar to Europe and Canada. This thesis suggests that demographically-mediated cultural contradictions will displace class contradictions as the principal challenge to liberal-capitalist modernity. In an age of declining mortality, fertility (along with migration) is becoming an increasingly important inter-group demographic determinant. One need look no further than the large cities of the West to see the impact that inter-ethnic fertility differences and immigration have had on the cultural and political landscape. The fertility of non-Europeans is rapidly converging with that of Europe, however the same cannot be said for the fertility of the religious. Given the capacity of ethnic ‘others’ to change the complexion of the West, is it not plausible to presume that the religiously committed can similarly transform society and politics through demographic advantage? This study begins by regressing fertility on religiosity and a set of control variables in the European Social Survey (ESS) as well as related datasets for the rest of the world (WVS) and United States (GSS). It then charts church attendance and other measures of religiosity by age and survey wave. A similar task is performed to isolate age-specific fertility by level of religiosity for each survey wave. All of this will generate parameters for demographic projections of the timing of reverse secularisation in the 21st century. Immigrants and their descendants will be increasingly important in Europe as native populations decline due to low fertility. Therefore, stage 2 analysis will examine religiosity (approximated by religious identification) and fertility over time among British Muslims in the ONS Longitudinal Census dataset. Time permitting, the project will analyse the electoral and ideological implications of these changes in global perspective. Department:School of Politics & Sociology, Birkbeck College Duration:5 November 2005 to 4 November 2006 Grant Type:Small Research Grant PublicationsKaufmann, E. (2010), in Stillwell, J., Norman, P., Thomas, C. and Surridge, P. (eds.) Spatial and Social Disparities Understanding Population Trends and Processes Volume 2, Springer, Dordrecht. Kaufmann, E. (2010) Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth: Demography and Politics in the Twentieth Century, Profile Books, London. [www.amazon.co.uk/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448] Kaufmann, E. with Skirbekk, V. and Goujon, A. (2009) Secularism, fundamentalism or Catholicism? The religious composition of the United States to 2043, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, accepted. Kaufmann, E. (2008) Human development and the Demography of Secularisation in Global Perspective, Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, 4: 1-37. Kaufmann, E. (2008) Europe's coming demographic revolution’, NACS Magazine, October. Kaufmann, E. (2007) Shall the religious inherit the Earth, Jewish Quarterly, Autumn. Kaufmann, E. (2006) Faith's comeback, Newsweek (International edition), 7-13 November. Kaufmann, E. (2006) Breeding for God, Prospect, November. Kaufmann, E. (2006) The end of secularisation in Europe? A demographic
perspective, American Sociological Review. PresentationsKaufmann, E. (2006) The end of secularisation in Europe? Presentation in Birkbeck College Staff Seminar series, 23 November. Kaufmann, E. (2006) The end of secularisation in Europe? Presentation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 23 October. Kaufmann, E. (2006) The end of secularisation in the West? Presentation at Conference on Political Demography: Ethnic, National and Religious Dimensions, LSE, 29-30 September. Kaufmann, E. (2006) De-secularisation? Religiosity, fertility and politics, Presentation at the British Society for Population Studies Conference, Southampton, 18-20 September. Kaufmann, E. (2006) 'The religious shall inherit the Earth?: De-Secularisation and the demographic imperative, Presentation to the American Political, Science Association (APSA), Philadelphia, 31 August. Kaufmann, E. (2006) 'Shall the religious inherit the Earth? The political implications of the second demographic transition, Presentation at the European Population Conference, Liverpool, 21-24 June. Kaufmann, E. (2006) The demographic contradictions of liberal capitalism: Rethinking Daniel Bell's theory, Libertarian Hawks or Cultural Communitarians? Neoconservatism and the Legacy of the New York Intellectuals, Presentation at Birkbeck College, 24-25 May. Kaufmann, E. (2006) A dying creed? The demographic contradictions of liberal capitalism', Presentation at UCL/Birkbeck seminar, 24 April 2006
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