The right is strongly pro-natal. Some of it is for religious reasons, some of it is because they want to control (no, don’t even, the constant talk of male leadership leaves this unquestionable), but a lot of it is that they figure if they out-breed their opponents they’ll win.
Now if you’re talking ethnicity or “race” this is indisputable. Want more whites, or latinos, or whatever, if you breed less than others, that’s going to tell.
But when you’re talking ideology and culture, it isn’t.
The anti-abortion right thinks that out-breeding will work for them, but out-breeding only works if the kids you’re popping up keep your beliefs.
Now this all very nice, and the numbers don’t look too bad, but there’s more to it than nominal membership. If you call yourself Christian but believe in abortion rights and contraception and women’s equality, you aren’t what the Christian “right” is looking for, are you?
Basically flat. What about by age?
Huh. Doesn’t look so good, does it? If you raise ’em and they don’t stay with you and you can’t convert non-members very well…
Whatever the deeper causes, religious disaffiliation in the U.S. is being fueled by switching patterns that started “snowballing” from generation to generation in the 1990s. The core population of “nones” has an increasingly “sticky” identity as it rolls forward, and it is gaining a lot more people than it is shedding, in a dynamic that has a kind of demographic momentum.
Christians have experienced the opposite pattern. With each generation, progressively fewer adults retain the Christian identity they were raised with, which in turn means fewer parents are raising their children in Christian households.
Now America’s still a very religious society. Far more so than Europe or most of the rest of the developed world.
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But replacement rates aren’t just about popping up babies and raising them with your beliefs. You have to be able to keep them once they’re adults. And seculars have been very, very good at converstion. Even back when everyone still said they were Christian, notice that abortion became legal, women got legal rights, contraception spread and so on. People said they were Christian, but if the Pope or their pastor said “no condoms, no pill” they ignored them.
Most people enjoy having sex. Most people, at least at some points in their lives, want to have a lot of sex, and want to do it without worrying about suddenly having to raise kids or having to go thru pregnancy.
(I often suspect that the most vehement anti-contraception and anti-abortion activists are people who are closet or in denial gays, or essentially asexual. “Sex is a duty, if we only have to have it to make babies, I won’t have to have it so often.”)
But the larger point here is that replacement rate for anything but biology is determined by ideological reproduction rates. If you can’t keep the people you raise in your ideology, then popping out more kids isn’t the solution.
Early Christians out-produced pagans, but if they hadn’t been able to keep their kids Christian: if pagans had been good at converting them, well, they would never have won.
What Christianity offers, in the US, is the church community. Church groups are one of the few social support groups left. If you need help, the church will often step up. And that makes it odd that the stickiness rate started declining in the 90s, just as government support also started a serious decline and as good jobs became harder and harder to get.
But there are other factors. One is that seculars, starting in the 70s, offered a better deal to women: a lot better deal. You could have your own bank account when married, you had no fault divorce, you could get that abortion and you didn’t have to always do what your husband said, nor did you have to marry just to get support.
Part of the secular offer became a lot better for half the population.
At the same time Christian ideology became less and less appealing. It was around the late 80s and early 90s that the hard-core Christians really began to win internal battles and made being anti-abortion the #1 litmus test, moved towards hardcore natalism and heavy parental authoritarianism with plenty of beating of children. Oh, and when all the “male leadership” stuff cropped up.
This is a better deal for some men (the one’s who like keeping their kids and wife under their thumbs with force) but it isn’t a better deal for a lot of women and kids. And when the kids grow up, well, all that heavy handed authoritarianism, justified by religion doesn’t make them think fondly of religion.
The community support deal within Christianity is a good one, but if the price is domestic violence, corporal punishment, an inferior position for women and less sex, plus more pregnancies whether you want them or not, plus more dangerous pregancies, well maybe the cost of that social support is too high?
Reproduction of groups and ideologies over time isn’t just about who bears more kids, it’s about who keeps them. If “give me the child and I’ll give you the adult works” you’re golden, but if it’s breaking down, well, you may just be producing the next generation of your ideological enemies.
Breeding isn’t enough. The life you offer has to seem better than what your opponents offer.
Churches should be cleaning up. As the last solid community support structure the offer something that almost no one else does. But at the same time as this became true they decided to be anti-sex, pro-hitting children, and for women to be subordinate to men.
Weird that more and more people don’t want that life.
bruce wilder
To understand what is going on, “ideologically”, among Christians, you have to distinguish what has happened over the long term demographically between Evangelicals, on the one hand, and what used to be called the Mainline Protestant denominations plus that biggest of all denominations, the Catholics, on the other hand.
The Evangelicals grew in the late 20th century as the Mainline (P + C) declined and they Evangelicals used “community” to do it, even when community sometimes bordered on cult. Evangelical pastors often conceive of their evangelism in entrepreneurial terms, building their individual congregations, and sometimes those congregations are more or less independent of larger hierarchies. But, while Mainline adherents were following family traditions and conceived of their religion in terms of “how they were raised” and “the faith of our fathers” or mothers, the “new” faith of evangelical converts has often proven to have shallow roots for people who drift in and out for community.
It has been at least a century since theology mattered to anyone in Western European religious cultures. Theology lost its credibility in the 17th century Enlightenment and theologically-based belief has been steadily crumbling ever since. Moral conviction had a revival in the 19th century after an 18th century renovation of Christian ethics that carried definite momentum into the 1960s, but has faded away in terms of secular politics.
In some important ways, the decline of religion in people’s lives and thinking is not its own story, but simply a reflection of increasing social atomism, as people think of their own identities in terms that make much less use of social association, family traditions, place or elaborate “belief” structures in which they have been indoctrinated by a special social caste.
Daniel Lynch
Religion is part of it, but note that non-religious (he’s not religious yet claims to identify with the conservative Christian culture) Elon Musk has been at the forefront of calling for more babies. Because Musk is a capitalist, and capitalism, as it is practiced, falls apart without growth. Musk wants a growing population to purchase more and more Teslas and Starlinks. Who wants to own stock in a company that is not growing?
In any event, nature will have the final word. If we don’t get our population under control, nature will control it for us, with disease and climate change.
Bill
Kurt Cobb [Resource Insights 17 November] gives an interesting suggests a solution in part caused by right-wing free enterprise capitalist business.
Soredemos
@bruce wilder
“elaborate “belief” structures in which they have been indoctrinated by a special social caste.”
This describes identity politics specifically, and much of modern liberalism as a whole, perfectly.
Religion hasn’t faded, it’s just changed form. Complete with heretics and excommunication, original sin and intrinsic evil, and so on. I can’t even really say the fantacism has remained but the more metaphysical, supernatural aspects have fallen away. Because liberals (and especially neoliberals…so liberals, really; I’m just repeating myself) frequently might as well be talking about souls and divine will.
Oakchair
he’s not religious yet claims to identify with the conservative Christian culture
——-
In most respects Christianity in America is less a religion and more a political-cultural identify. It’s escaped the orbit of the teachings of Jesus Christ, existential philosophy, faith and community.
As Soredemos points out religion is still rampant in society; the major difference being what is viewed as the Gospel, God, and heretical.
Ironically the Democratic party lost to the Republican party in part because people are infuriated at various “secular” (for lack of a better term) religious dictates.
Look at which Trump appointees are causing the most uproar in neo-liberal minds. Is it the ones wanting genocide, and war? The ones who want to further entrench the oligarchy? Or is it the ones who question and oppose “secular” religious Gospel?
Adam Eran
Jesus “great commandment”: Love God with all your heart mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.” I’d suggest that since “commandment” can also be translated as “proclamation” this is as much a statement of what is as it is of what ought to be. If you don’t love yourself, you’re unlikely to love your neighbor. And that thing to which you give your wholehearted devotion…? That could be anything from the God of Abraham to the Oakland Raiders. Either way, it’s your God. There really aren’t any atheists, or if they say they’re atheists, they’re in denial.
Joan
I definitely think the downsides of a church community can be enough to leave. You can sink years into a church community that then ostracizes you if you need to divorce. You’re better served by cultivating your own friends apart from a church because then if your life is falling apart you have people who care about you.
Mark Level
What is and what is not “Christian” can become very garbled over time. I’m going to tell an anecdotal story about a former friend of mine– it’s only an anecdote, but it still tells you something, I think:
I had a friend I knew from the Western Hermetic, Co-Masonic milieu, at one time he was a very brilliant guy & open-minded. But–
So this guy had a German last-name, uglier than my own, Schuerholz. He grew up in a very left-wing family, his parents were active in the Quaker community. His dad had a very interesting back ground, he was a painter/ visual artist, & his main teacher was the amazing George Grosz, an escapee from Weimar Germany who had done left-wing, pro-Communist/ Socialist political cartoons during the WWI era, of fat, corrupt oligarchs with whores & wounded veterans starving on the street.
My friend went to a good E. Coast University, he had one younger brother, overweight & socially inept, who became a fundamentalist Christian. At my friend’s wedding in California (before my friend lost his mind), he ridiculed his brother very effectively for Christian hypocrisy, right in front of me & others: “You hate gays so much & Rabbi Yeshua never said one word against them. He said negative things about gluttons many times, & just look at you!”
But while living in Oakland & working in S.F. he started to become very anti-minority (despite the fact his wife was Asian), hated blacks especially. This took awhile. First he started arguing to me & others that those of us who didn’t like the rich, cops, etc. were just duped “Christians”!! And as dumb & superstitious as most Christians are (meaning evangelicals, Catholics, etc.) Any concept of social justice or empathy became verboten to him. He soon announced that he was a “paleo-conservative”, a Pat Buchanan knockoff. I know he nearly got mugged one time in a BART station in SF. He worked for Jerry Brown when he had stopped being Governor the 2nd time & shifted to be the Oakland mayor. He greatly admired Brown’s “charisma.”
The change started slow, but really accelerated. First he did genetic testing and started bragging he was “99.8% pure German.” Then he went from being anti-Zionist to gradually being anti-Semitic. (His girlfriend had a friend named “Gravity Goldberg.” He spewed contempt for her due to her last name.) His anti-black bigotry really took off when he was an Ombudsman for the City of Oakland. The last time we ever hung out (I shunned him after some things he’d said), he whined about all the black Oakland populace coming to the city for aid. His former respect for Nietzsche turned into insane Will-to-Power fantasies. He said the black residents of Oakland were all “lazy,” “unfit”, not smart enough to survive (straight Social Darwinism), he made sure the last time we talked to put his wishes for all of them to die into the passive voice. They are all Unfit!! They will die off en masse ‘coz they’re not smart or motivated enough to survive, etc.
After I’d stopped talking to him, his co-workers became aware of his basically Neo-Nazi beliefs & he quickly became very unpopular at work. I’m not sure when he lost his job (I had also unfriended him on FBook after our final breakfast meeting), but mutual friends told me he’d changed his profile to pretend to be back on the East Coast working in a bookstore to hide from all the lefties & non-white former coworkers who hated him.
The arc of his thinking clearly followed his disgust for his parents’ empathy & siding with the downtrodden, many of us guys either rebel against our parents (I did with my dad, who was a racist, Nixon-loving troglodyte) or become them. It’s sad his psyche went to the furthest extreme. When he almost got mugged, even though he was a tall guy, he responded by falling to the ground, kicking out at the mugger & screaming until the mugger just lost patience & wandered away . . . So there was some insecurity about his manliness that became greatly inflated over time. And who’s tougher than SS toughs?
I think John Lennon’s statement, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain” means a lot to me. I really don’t even like the term God, it’s absurd on its face; if I practiced formal religion I’d align with the Gnostics who believe the original “God” was just a Demiurge (Mark Twain famously denounced the tyrannical JHVH as pretty much that way after he visited Palestine & N. Africa) who got bored with his “Creation” and went off to do something else.
The “since you believe in Social Equity you are a duped Christian” argument didn’t really land with me. Were the people who did the French Revolution duped Christians? With very few exceptions, this was clearly not the case. Live & learn.
mago
Ten years or so ago I commented to a friend about the latest atrocities Israel was inflicting on the Palestinians at that time, and he replied that the latter were outbreeding the former and that’s what scared the Israelis. Made sense then, makes sense now.
Anyway, I cut my teeth on the Paul Erlich (?) model of overpopulation, which I’ve abandoned for diverse reasons over the years.
On another note I did some personal chef time for a Semitic clan long ago and far away, the main driver of which considered it his duty to enrich a defective gene pool by procreating his own presumed superior genes.
Sure. Ok. I lovingly fed his offspring, now adults with whom I have no contact and haven’t seen in decades.
What’s my point?
It has to do with ego and tribal identity, which manifests through political means under a religious guise. Power through numbers.
Breed on . . .
Hickory
On the point of closet asexuals or gays: some kinds of child abuse will cause people to actually resist pleasure and see sex as evil. Hetero men may actually see women as the devil.
Chapter 42 in One Disease, One Cure goes into this – Christianity has a long history of child abuse which I believe is a major factor in the Catholic anti-women, anti-pleasure ideology. It has so many profoundly disturbing effects that can last a lifetime if not addressed, and most don’t.
When some people like pleasure, and others literally find pleasure repulsive or terrifying and avoid
It, no exaggeration, it makes it very difficult to agree on anything at all politically, and various research studies point this out. All this is covered in the book to explore why unhealthy cultures can remain unhealthy so incredibly long, even when most people are dissatisfied.
Richard Holsworth
Full blown Nazi Musk: We have to maintain the cultural identity of the various countries, otherwise they will disappear. Ithink there is value to a culture, and we don’t want cultures [to disappear]. We don’t want Japan to disappear. We don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear. We don’t want France as a culture to disappear. I think we have to maintain the reasonable cultural identity of the various countries, or they simply will not be those countries. You know, Italy is the people of Italy. The buildings are there, but really, what is Italy? Italy is the people of Italy.”
Poster “The Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and German Honor” a schematic of the forbidden degrees of marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans and the text of the Law for the Protection of German Blood. “Maintaining the purity of blood insures the survival of the German people.”