Rebirth of Western Religion

With the spate of religion-bashing books coming out in the last year (by well known authors including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Michel Onfray, Victor Stenger) one might be tempted, and some are encouraged, to believe that the prophesy “Gott ist tot” of Nietzsche’s famous madman has finally come to pass in the Western world. Yet all these books have about them “an odd defensiveness -- as though they were not a sign of victory but of desperation.” In Western Europe it appears that the madman was right, but everywhere else on Earth religion is surging.

The secularist story line goes like this. “As people become more educated and more prosperous they find themselves both more skeptical of religion's premises and less needful of its consolations. Hence, in the long run, religion, or more specifically the Christianity so long dominant on the West, will die out.” Indeed, what one sees in Europe today are elderly altar servers in childless churches attended by mere handfuls of pensioners. “If God were to be dead in the Nietzschean sense, one suspects that the wake would look a lot like this.”

Yet two leading secularism theorists (Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, 2006) have noted that in fact “secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history.” Not only that, but as Robert Royal observes, “three centuries of debunking, skepticism, criticism, revolution, and scorn by secularists not only have failed to defeat religious belief, but have actually enhanced its self-defense.” (The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, 2006. See also Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, 1999)

Now, in a scholarly piece by Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution (“How the West Really Lost God”) secularist theory is put to the test of reason and empiricism. “What secularization theory assumes is that religious belief comes ontologically first for people and that it goes on to determine or shape other things they do -- including such elemental personal decisions as whether they marry and have children or not.” Hence the plummeting birth rates in Western Europe outside the Muslim communities.

Norris and Inglehart, for example, clearly state the cause and effect.

“Secularization and human development have a powerful negative impact on human fertility rates. Practically all of the countries in which secularization is most advanced show fertility rates far below the replacement level -- while societies with traditional religious orientations have fertility rates that are two or three times the replacement level.” When stated that way the outcome seems inevitable: the death of the West through the inexorable tide of demographics.

However, Mary Eberstadt asks why must the cause-effect vector be as is commonly assumed? Might not the decline of childbearing come first, then driving the decline of religiosity?

The Western European data seem to support that time-reversed point of view. What demographers call the “unprecedented and overall sustained fall in birthrate that characterizes Western Europe today” began in France in the late eighteenth century, but in Britain, which was then richer than France, the decline started a century later. In each case the decline in churchgoing kicked in 1-2 generations later. In Ireland the birthrate decline followed by the religious decline occurred within one generation (from 1970 to 2005). European fertility in general dropped well before the dramatic demise of religious practice seen today.

Eberstadt argues convincingly how the act of creation and child rearing encourage parents into communion with something larger than themselves, in communities of like-minded believers (ie in church). There are even fewer atheists in the nursery than in the foxhole. For the details check out her paper at
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/06/how_the_west_really_lost_god.html

This new perspective goes a long way toward explaining one of the most puzzling aspects of American exceptionalism. Richard Dawkins posed the problem this way: “The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religious country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. I am continually asked why this is, and I do not know.”

The 2007 Princeton Survey found that 91 percent of Americans believe in God, as opposed to 6 percent agnostic and 3 percent atheist. Might it be because we are still having babies? And it is not only Hispanic immigrants who are having babies in America. Birthrates are well above replacement level among well-educated and well-off Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Evangelical Christians and Catholics.

Seen in this light the death of the West is not inevitable. Fertility rates have waxed and waned throughout history. (The low birth rate among Roman patricians was of sufficient concern under the emperor Augustus as to result in the imposition of the family-friendly Julian laws.) Today there are many socio-economic forces (see Social Security) that could well drive a baby boom in the highly secular countries of Western Europe, Canada and Japan. If that happens the appeal of religion will rise and the death of the West, and of God, will be averted.

We should all hope so because the alternative is grim indeed.