The pieces don't seem to fit.

Right-wing Catholic writer, Mary Eberstadt, has tried to explain the rise of secularization in the West. And she tries to do it and promote a Catholic view of things at the same time. Having babies is important, it is the only justification for sex, according to the Catholic sect. She argues that secularization of a society follows the decline in population growth. As people stop having more and more babies they cease to be religious.

Because families are smaller today than they used to be that is promoting a change in beliefs. Her evidence, in my opinion, is pretty flimsy. She also assumes that a smaller family is a "decline of the family." Big Catholic families ("every little sperm is sacred" - see video below for fun) would be described as a successful family. Having fewer children is not the decline of the family. It is just smaller families. People stil have families. Even just a couple who love each other are a family. But the Catholics are quite obsessive about reproducing—odd since their priests are so bad at it—though not for a lack of trying in some case. But altar boys just don't get pregnant.



Eberstadt theorizes that family sizes fell in Europe and then religion declined as a result. And, this is pretty much true. But corrallation is not causation. She says: "In France, for example — where secularism has been a ferocious social and political force for centuries — people generally stopped having babies much sooner than they did elsewhere on the Continent."

So, she assumes the one causes the other. And then to prove it says: "Once we allow that family decline is at least partly responsible for religious decline, we can do a better job of explaining the 'exceptions' in the literature than does secularization theory itself. Specifically, we can explain the largest problem that has bedeviled the theory all along: i.e., the difference in religiousity between Europe and the United States."

This is Eberstadt's proof. Since the U.S. is more religious and has higher birth rates than Europe then "changes in marrying and having babies are helping to drive changes in religiosity..." She claims that: "While fertility has plummeted in most of the rest of the industrialized world, to take one example, in the United States it remains the same, even registering a slight increase."

According to the The World Factbook, compiled by the CIA the fertility rate, that is the average number of children that a woman will give birth to in her lifetime, is 2.05 for the United States. For the "secular" French it is 1.98. The difference is rather small. So the drop in French fertility rates, as compared to the U.S. is all of 0.07. Basically that means for every 1 million American women there are 2,050,000 births and for every 1 million French women there are 1.980,000 births. Is a birth difference of just 70,000 per million women enough to drive the French to secularism while Americans are religious?

It is also curious, if the CIA numbers are correct, why cultures that are far more secular than the United States can have higher fertility rates? For instance, Greenland, a Danish outpost, has a birth rate of 2.19. The difference between Greenland and the United States is much greater than the difference between the United States and France (0.14 vs 0.07). If family size drives religiosity to some degree then we would have to presume that Greenland is even more religious than the United States. Unfortunately, for the theory, that isn't the case.

Another example is New Zealand. The fertility rate in New Zealand is 2.1, which is higher than in the United States. But church attendance in New Zealand is on levels well below the United States. Only 7.5% of the Kiwis are in church on any given Sunday. While surveys in the United States show about 20% of the population as saying they have "no religion," the New Zealand census showed that 32% of Kiwis claim to have no religion. Higher birth rates and higher secularization.

Eberstadt attempted to explain why the United States is the exception in religious trends around the world. She assumes that is the case. I don't think so. Religion is on the decline in the United States EVEN as birth rates remain steady or, as Eberstadt claimed "even registering a slight increase." She tries to explain exceptions to one theory and offers another that has even more exceptions that need explaining.

Take Cyprus as another example. Cypriots tend to be more religious than Americans. The percentage of Cypriots who claim to be members of Greek Orthodox church is greater than the number of Americans who claim to be Christian. Yet their birth rates are very low in comparison, just 1.77.

If Eberstadt's family-driving-religion theory made sense then the following ought to be true:

• Greenland ought to be more religious than the United States. In fact, it is less religious.

• New Zealand ought to be more religious than the United States. In fact, it too is less religious.

• Cyprus ought to be less religious than the United States but instead is more religous.

Now let us look at actual trends in the United States, trends that run counter to Eberstandt's theory.

Eberstadt notes that the U.S. has relatively higher birth rates compared to the rest of the West. She assumes religion causes that. Yet Americans today are far less religious than they were just a few years ago. The number of Americans who classify themselves as non-believers has doubled in recent years even as the birth rate has not declined, as would be expected if Eberstadt is correct. The most recent American Religous Identification Survey shows that currently 70% of Americans say they are Christian. In 1990 it was 86%. That is a substantial drop in a very short time that clearly is unrelated to birth rates. The Survey says: "The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not coe from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion."

The Survey said, in a press statement:

The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, had now increased to 15 percent. …Northern New England has now taken over the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the county, with Vermont, at 34 percent “Nones,’ leading all other states by a full 9 points. Ariela Keyser who helped conduct the survey said: “The Nones are the only group to have grown in every state of the union.”

The Survey says that statistical analysis indicates that a lot of people who decline to answer questions abour religion are more likely in the "None" category. They write, "we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990." Clearly the secularization process is taking place in the United States, and at a relatively rapid pace, while birth rates are not declining. This ought not be happening if Eberstadt's theory makes sense. I conclude it doesn't.

Oddly Albert Mohler, comes to the defense of Eberstadt's theory. He says: "Mary Eberstadt is also surely right." He says that American "exceptionalism" is evidence of it. Southern Baptist Mohler is actually contradicting himself. In his own blog he previous claimed that "The worldview of most Americans is now thoroughly secularized..." He claimed the church was displaced as is "characteristic of the process of secularization which has now so thoroughly alterned the landscape of American culture." He goes as far as saying that America is a "post-Christian" nation. But if America is a post-Christian nation, as Mohler claimed, then Eberstadt's theory is wrong.

Poor Rev. Mohler, whatever you think of his theology, his logic is piss poor. He wants America to be the exception to the general theory and thus highly religious in one case. But in another case he claims religion has been displaced and America is now "post-Christian." I'm not surprised he has said contradictory things. His motives were different in each case. The artilce on "post-Christian" America was the typical doom and gloom you hear from fundamentalists. His cheerleading for Eberstadt's theory however, had a different agenda.

As Mohler sees it, and perhaps as Eberstadt does as well, this theory supposedly proved "the importance of preserving family structure and high rates of childbirth in light of spiritual commitments." When fundamentalist talk about "preserving family" you know that an old-fashioned gay bashing isn't far behind.

As Mohler wrote himself, America has entered a "post-Christian" era. Apparently he thinks America is still the "exception" to secularization while being a shining example of secularization simultaneously. It is one thing, and it's complete opposite, at the same time. In other words: A is not A. Now you know why I say he is poor at logic.

Both Mohler and Eberstadt have religious agendas. That's fine. We know they have them. But I think it is clear that they are trying to interpret reality to fit with their religion. Unfortunately for them reality doesn't work that way. It is what it is. Perhaps in Mohler's mind A can be non-A but in the real world A is A.

The post-Christian shift in America continues.

For several years I have been claiming that the United States is entering a post-Christian stage of intellectual development, something I consider to be a positive trend. I argued that this trend was part of a wider trend toward more social liberalism in generally, another thing which I consider to be generally positive. Last year I wrote: “Americans are moving rapidly and quickly toward social liberalism… The American people got tired of the culture wars and they seem to be abandoning the cultural conservatives.” All this is part of our country “moving toward a post-Christian culture.”

In 2007 I wrote an article entitled “The rise of post-Christian America” which got a lot of attention in some circles. I said “there has been a marked shift in American attitudes toward religion that has come about in the last four to eight years.” I pointed to several trends, which I felt were indications “that the United States is about to enter the post-Christian phase of intellectual development that has already dominated every Western nation except the United States.”

I also warned Christians, who rarely listen to what I have to say anyway, that there is a tipping-point in religious attitudes. I wrote:

…that religion in America has relied heavily on group pressure and social norms. People rarely embraced religion because they were intellectual convinced it was rational. …Most religionists embraced theism merely because everyone else did. If fewer and fewer people embrace religion that gives others permission to reject it as well.

The most recent American Religious Identification Survey (2008) shows that the trends I’ve claimed exist are substantiated. This survey notes that in 1990 86% of Americans identified themselves as Christian in some form or another. In 2008 that has dropped to 70%. In rough terms that means that approximately one in five of the individuals who identified as Christian in 1990 no longer do so. The survey also says that the decline in numbers of Christians is not due to them converting to a new faith but abandoning their faith. “The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.” The number of Americans who say they lack religious beliefs increased from 8.2% in 1990 to 15% in 2008.

However, the number of Americans who fall in the non-believer camp may still be higher than these numbers indicate. While 15% of Americans admit to being without a religious belief the percentage saying they will have a non-religious funeral is at 27%. Since the religious community has continually demonized atheists and other non-believers the numbers of people holding such beliefs tends to be higher than the number who admit holding such beliefs. Another area which may be hiding non-believers is the increasing percentage of Americans who refused to answer whether they believed or not, or who claimed (unconvincingly) that they “don’t know” what they believe. That category went from 2.3% in 1990 to 5.2% in 2008. The survey says: “If we include those Americans who either don’t know their religious identification (0.9 percent) or refuse our key question (4.1 percent), and who tend to somewhat resemble ‘Nones’ in their social profile and beliefs, we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.” The raw number of people who identified as non-believers went from 14,331,000 people in 1990 to 34,169,000 in 2008, an increase of 138%.

At the same time the numbers of people who are members of Christian sects, but who hold distinctly unchristian beliefs about God, is another factor to consider. Some self-identified Christians are not actually Christians when it comes to their beliefs. The percentage of people who claim to belong to Christian sects are approximately 70%. And the survey shows that 69.5% of all Americans believe there is a personal God. At first glance that seems to be a relatively small difference. But we ought to remember about 78% of the public claims to identify with a faith that teaches the existence of a personal God. Some unknown, but not insignificant, number of non-believers are a member of the various sects even today.

Nor are all religions are being affected equally. Some Christian sects are in more trouble than others. And some are facing future problems more significant than others today. The number of Catholics has declined slightly, from 26.2% to 25.1% but this hides the decline of native-born Catholics since immigration is helping hold these numbers steady. Baptists have significantly declined from 19.3% in 1990 to 15.8% in 2008. And mainline Protestants have dropped from 18.7% to 12.9% of the population during the same period.

The numbers of those who describe themselves as broadly Christian has gone from 14.8% to 14.2%. Pentecostals increased slightly during this time period from 3.2% to 3.5%. But all that gain was in the 1990s. Since 2001 the percentage of Pentecostals has declined slightly. And contrary to the spin put on church membership by the Mormon leadership that sect has had no growth whatsoever in the last 18 years in terms of their percentage of the population. It has remained steady at 1.4%.

Future problems for a sect are indicated by the percentage of young people in their pews. If a congregation is primarily made up of the elderly it will disappear relatively quickly. If it is mostly young people it will probably grow. An estimated 22% of the American population are between the ages of 18 and 29. Below is a chart of selected Christian sects and how far off they are from that percentage in regards to church membership. A negative number implies they are that many percentage points below the national average of young people. I have added the “nones” in as a comparison.

Catholic -1
Baptist – 11
Mainline Christian -4
Pentecostal – 6
Mormon 0
Jewish -1
Nones +7

That Mormons have no statistically advantage in terms of youthful members is rather surprising. According to the survey 22% of Mormons are between 18 and 29, which is precisely the percentage of Americans between those ages. Yet, according to the New Yorker: “The Mormon birth rate is about fifty per cent higher than the national average.” A higher birth rate ought to mean that the percentage of young Mormons is higher than the national average not the same.

Mormonism is clearly having a problem. It seems unable to hold on to converts and unable to hold on to their own young. The 2001 ARIS numbers showed that the numbers who left the Mormon cult was slightly higher than the number joining it. Official Mormon numbers are vastly higher than the numbers of people who actually think they are Mormon—in other words the Mormon sect counts as members people who do not think they are Mormons. For instance, the LDS sect claimed to have 176,998 members in the UK as members while the official census showed only 61,949 people said they were Mormons. Arthur Sido, a former Mormon wrote: “Before I left Mormonism I was the membership clerk in the bishopric, and the number of people on the rolls who were not only not attending, but outright hostile is staggering (maybe as high as 50% or more never attended).” The Salt Lake Tribune says, “the number of Latter-day Saints who are considered active churchgoers is only about a third of the total” of official membership figures. And one Mormon expert says that the sect “lose 70 to 80 percent of their converts.”

The last area I will cover is where non-believers live: some states have a higher percentage of non-believers than other states. Regionally non-believers are more likely to be found in New England and in the West. Here are the states with the largest percentage of non-believers.

Vermont • 34
Wyoming • 28
Washington • 25
Maine • 25
Oregon • 24
Nevada • 24
Delaware • 23
Idaho • 23
Massachusetts • 22
Montana • 21
Colorado • 21
California • 18
Arizona • 17
Ohio • 17
Nebraska • 17
Michigan • 16
New Mexico • 16
Wisconsin • 15
Iowa • 15
Indiana • 15
New Jersey • 15
Pennsylvania • 15
Virginia • 15
West Virginia • 15

As you can see non-believers are a substantial number of people in many states today. In fact many US states now have more non-believers than there are Catholics. States where non-believers outnumber Catholics are: Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Vermont, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. In Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina and Colorado, Catholics and non-believers are in a statistical tie. While I don’t have hard numbers to calculate the population percentages of Baptists in the various states it appears that non-believers outnumber them in approximately 32 states. Compare the map at the top of the page to the one below of Baptists in the various counties to see what I mean.

Note: The first map charts the percentage of non-believers in the various states. Please note that the ARIS survey seems to have nothing listed for either Alaska or Hawaii. I have emailed them for the numbers for those states. I will follow up on this with an article on what the ramifications of this shift are for American politics.

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The rise of a post-Christian America.

This blog has long been arguing that the Religious Right has destroyed the credibility of religion. Now it is no secret that I no more believe in a supernatural being than I believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus or “good government”. There are just some things that really stretch credibility.

I have said that there has been a marked shift in American attitudes toward religion that has come about in the last four to eight years. The Christian Right has so tied themselves to Bush’s apron strings that when the apron got tarnished so did they. But then the Bush years wouldn’t have been possible without them. They aren’t exactly innocent victims of the Bush magic. They were willing accomplices.

I have noticed a much larger percentage of young people who self identify as non-believers. And I have also seen other non-believers becoming far more militant and vocal in their disgust at what the Religious Right has done to the United States. I have previously mentioned a couple of opinion polls that seemed to verify the shift in views and I said that the best seller status of numerous books debunking a deity was indicative of this new found skepticism among Americans.

And now one of the major religious polling organizations, The Barna Group, has confirmed that Christianity is in crisis in George Bush’s America. It has lost its credibility especially among the young. Fundamentalism wanted a culture war and religion appears to be one of the casualties.

The Barna Group says:

that 16- to 29-year-olds exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade, many of the Barna measures of the Christian image have shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people. For instance, a decade ago the vast majority of Americans outside the Christian faith, including young people, felt favorably toward Christianity’s role in society. Currently, however, just 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a "good impression" of Christianity.

If religion in general was badly hit in this survey it was evangelicalism that suffered the most. According to their most recent study only 3% of “non-believers” in this age group “express favorable views of evangelicals”. In comparison a few years ago 25% of them had favorable views. The generation that has entered adulthood in the last five years is not only more negative about religion but especially negative about evangelicalism.

Among young non-believers, 87% said they found Christianity judgmental while 85% said it was hypocritical and 75% said it was too political. Of course this was among non-believers. The bad news for the gospel is that young Christians were almost as negative about their own faith.

Even among young Christians, many of the negative images generated significant traction. Half of young churchgoers said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political. One-third said it was old-fashioned and out of touch with reality.

And one major reason for this negativity is the moralistic campaigns that have scapegoated gay people. The survey says “a new image” has “steadily growing in prominence over the last decade. Today, the most common perception is that present-day Christianity is ‘anti-homosexual.’” This view was held by 91% of the non-believers and by “80% of young churchgoers” And this will send Fred Phelps and James Dobson up the wall: “As the research probed this perception, non-Christians and Christians explained that beyond their recognition that Christians oppose homosexuality, they believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians.”

Young people today, even Christians, frequently told the survey that Christianity today is no longer what it was supposed to be. They say it changed and changed for the worse. And one result of this is a large increase in the numbers of people who are not Christians. Simply put, each new generation has a larger share of people who are not Christians (that is, atheists, agnostics, people associated with another faith, or those who have essentially no faith orientation). The new book refers to this group as "outsiders" because they are describing what Christianity looks like from an outsider’s perspective. Among adults over the age of 40, only about one-quarter qualify as outsiders, while among the 16 to 29 segment, two-fifths are outsiders. This represents a significant migration away from the dominant role that Christianity has had in America.

And remember that the people who did the survey are evangelical Christians. They warn their fellow believers “this is not a passing fad wherein young people will become ‘more Christian’ as they grow up.” They say a “fundamental recalibration is occurring within the spiritual allegiance of America’s upcoming generations.” Hey, I’ve been saying that for a couple of years now.

It is one thing to know what is happening and entirely another to know what it means. And what is means is often more important than what is happening. I can only offer a thesis at this point. This information may well be an indication that the United States is about to enter the post-Christian phrase of intellectual development that has already dominated every Western nation except the United States.

No other developed nation in the world is so besotted with religion as is the United States. Even the English-speaking West is has not been Christian, in any meaningful sense of the word, for decades. And what Christians they do have tend not to be Biblical literalists or advocates of some form of theocracy.

One reason that is often posited for why other former Christian nations abandoned their faith in practice is that they had a stronger church/state alliance. In the United States religion was not tied to politics, until recently, and thus religion didn’t suffer a dip in its reputation when the state mechanism failed . If this argument is true, and it is a rather old one, then we end up back at the point where the Republicans and the Evangelicals appear to have been involved in a mutual suicide pack. The Christians discredited the Republican Party and the Republican Party discredited the Christians.

If the number of self-identified non-believers continues to increase as it has this is a problem for Christianity. The reality is that religion in America relied heavily on group pressure and social norms. People rarely embraced religion because they were intellectually convinced it was rational. They embraced religion because they were pushed into it or merely following the crowd. Most religionists embraced theism merely because everyone else did.

If fewer and fewer people embrace religion that gives others permission to reject it as well. The fervent religious nature of Hispanics is well known, but what is not so well known is that many of them dramatically change their religious inclinations upon arrival in the United States. The New York Times reported, “that increasing percentages of Hispanics are abandoning church, suggesting to researchers that along with assimilation comes a measure of secularization.”

One sociologist said that when immigrants come to the U.S. they “have the freedom to create [their] own identity.” And about one in ten of them now say they are without faith. Yet two-thirds of the new non-believers say they previously were religious. And even those who still cling to a faith have abandoned church to a much larger extent than before. In the U.S. the pressure to be religious was less than in their home countries in Central or South America.

The same process is happening with the young in America. As more and more announce their disbelief it gives others permission to do so as well. With the social pressure broken disbelief is bound to continue. And as people react to the disgusting displays of theocratic power-lust by fanatical fundamentalists the reaction against religion will continue. The reality is that the Moral Majoritarians did themselves in.

Certainly the atrocities of 9/11 showed people that religious fanaticism can be deadly. General speaking American religion has been relatively peaceful. Major incidents of religiously motivated bloodshed have been rare in America. We had the Salem witch trials, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Jonestown suicide cult. (What happened at Waco was more the fanaticism of government and the inept control of Janet Reno than it was religion to blame.) Europeans however, live with hundreds of years of religiously motivated killing.

Americans were used to having a more benign religion. So when religiously-motivated extremists killed 3,000 people on 9/11 it was rather shocking to many Americans. That atrocity gave them permission to reconsider the role of religion in the modern world. And along the way American fundamentalists have encouraged that thought process, although inadvertently. Their ability to come across like the mad mullahs of Islam has only caused more people to see Christianity as potentially as lethal as Islam -- historically it was just as lethal, if not more so. The idea that religion is inherently benign died for many Americans on 9/11.

Another good thing to consider is that 9/11, and continuing problems with Islamic terrorists, is doing for Islam what theocrats have done for Christianity. The number of former Muslims willing to denounce Islam has grown. And support for fundamentalist views of Islam has started to wane even in Islamic nations. The Pew Global Attitudes survey says:

Concerns over Islamic extremism... are shared to a considerable degree by the publics in several predominantly Muslim nations surveyed. Nearly three-quarters of Moroccans and roughly half of those in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia see Islamic extremism as a threat to their countries. At the same time, most Muslim publics are expressing less support for terrorism than in the past. Confidence in Osama bin Laden has declined markedly in some countries and fewer believe suicide bombings that target civilians are justified in the defense of Islam. The polling also finds that in most majority-Muslim countries surveyed, support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence in defense of Islam has declined significantly. In Turkey, Morocco and Indonesia, 15% or fewer now say such actions are justifiable. In Pakistan, only one-in-four now take that view (25%), a sharp drop from 41% in March 2004. In Lebanon, 39% now regard acts of terrorism as often or sometimes justified, again a sharp drop from the 73% who shared that view in 2002. A notable exception to this trend is Jordan, where a majority (57%) now says suicide bombings and other violent actions are justifiable in defense of Islam.

Woman in particular have been the victims of Islamic extremism and thus it is no coincidence that women are among the most vocal critics of Islam today. I could name Marina Mahathir, Homa Darabi, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali as prominent examples. The rise of blogs within Islamic nations has given many people there the ability to question Islam in forums that protect their anonymity. Something which previously had to be done in the West when Christianity was questioned and for similar reasons.

Organizations have been formed to help Muslims reject their religion. Founded by Ehsan Jami, the Committee for Ex-Muslims exists in numerous countries. Founder Jami, “rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001.” Jami is a Dutch citizen born to an Islamic family. In Germany the Committee is run by Mina Ahadi, an Iranian and has 400 members. And in England Maryam Namazie is leading the local chapter.

The reality is that the rise of religiously-motivated intolerance and terrorism is forcing rational people, the world over, to reconsider what religious beliefs they do hold. And while fundamentalist forces are still influential it is my opinion that they are losing their grip on their own followers. Their own extremism is creating a world-wide countermovement. The trends will be most prominent in the United States but we will see more and more individuals within Islamic nations and cultures embracing secular, rational values and rejecting the faith of their childhood.

Note: There are some videos from an Islamic secularist conference at TV Liberty. All the videos can be watched here.