The religious shall inherit… the white house?
Posted on | May 9, 2012 by Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. |
Eric Kauffmann thinks the religious and the conservative will inherit the earth–eventually–due to their higher fertility. In this essay at The American he says they may well win the election this Novemember, too.
The GOP has a lead over the Democrats among white women and among younger women at all levels of income and education. If the childbearing gap among women aged 20-40 continues to widen, this will certainly benefit the GOP. But even if Republican women enjoyed a 30 percent fertility advantage for a century, this would only halve the gains accruing to the Democrats from immigration. Were immigration to be cut in half, however, the GOP would quickly begin to close in on the Democrats beyond 2040….
Many of us believe the ethos of society in a century will more closely resemble the ideas of Christopher Hitchens than those of Jerry Falwell. Yet we forget that most people get their religion the old-fashioned way: through birth. Demography is not destiny, but it is the most predictable of the social sciences. As the population of the world peaks and begins to decline later in this century, the strongly religious will stand against the tide. In so doing, they will remake societies and wash away many of our certainties about secularization, Enlightenment, and the End of History.
