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.
***
(If you like the writing here, well, support it if you can. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. Please Subscribe or Donate.)
***
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?