Secularization will stall in the USA by 2050

In recent years, I have not been able to find recent scholarship having to do with religious/irreligious demographic projections as far as the United States.  However, today I found a 2019 article written by a top-notch scholar about this matter. 

 On July 24, 2019, due to religious immigration to the United States and the higher fertility rate of religious people, Eric Kaufmann wrote in an article entitled Why Is Secularization Likely to Stall in America by 2050? A Response to Laurie DeRose: 

Overall, the picture suggests that the U.S. will continue to secularize in the coming decades. However, a combination of religious immigration, immigrant religious retention, slowing religious decline due to a rising prevalence of believers among the affiliated, and higher native religious birth rates will result in a plateauing of secularizing trends by mid-century.

In 2011, the scholar Eric Kauffman wrote the book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century and he published the academic paper Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century which argued that secularization would peak in the developed world by 2050. 

In addition, in their 2010 journal article entitled, Secularism, Fundamentalism or Catholicism? The Religious Composition of the United States to 2043 published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Eric Kaufmann, Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon wrote:

We find considerable stability of religious groups over time, but there are some important shifts. Hispanic Catholics experience the strongest growth rates to 2043. Immigration, high fertility, and a young age structure will enable this group to expand from 10 to 18 percent of the American population between 2003 and 2043, despite a net loss of communicants to secularism and Protestantism. This will power the growth of Catholics as a whole, who will surpass Protestants by mid century within the nation’s youngest age groups. This represents a historic moment for a country settled by anti-Catholic Puritans, whose Revolution was motivated in part by a desire to spread dissenting Protestantism and whose populationon the eve of revolution was 98 percent Protestant (Huntington 2004; Kaufmann 2004). Another important development concerns the growth of the Muslim population and decline of the Jews. High Muslim fertility and a young Muslim age structure contrasts with low Jewish childbearing levels and a mature Jewish age structure. Barring an unforeseen shift in the religious composition and size of the immigrant flow, Muslims will surpass Jews in the population by 2023 and in the electorate by 2028. This could have profound effects on the course of American foreign policy. Within the non-Hispanic white population, we expect to see continued Liberal Protestant decline due to low fertility and a net loss in exchanges with other groups. White Catholics will also lose due to a net outflow of converts. Fundamentalist and Moderate Protestant denominations will hold their own within the white population, but will decline overall as the white share of the population falls.

The finding that Protestant fundamentalism may decline in relative terms over the medium term contrasts with a prevailing view that envisions the continued growth of “strong religion” (Stark and Iannaccone 1994a). This is the result of an older age structure, which increases loss through mortality, and immigration, which reduces the size of all predominantly white denominations — all of which are poorly represented in the immigration flow. Fundamentalists’ relatively high fertility and net surplus from the religious marketplace is not sufficient to counteract the effects of immigration. Obviously, this could change if significant immigration begins to arrive from more Pentecostalist source countries such as Guatemala or parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Our work also sheds light on the religious restructuring paradigm, though we do not find a clear victor between secularism and fundamentalism. The secular population will grow substantially in the decades ahead because it has a young age structure and more people leave religion than enter it. The sharpest gains for secularism will be within the white population, where seculars will surpass fundamentalists by 2030. On the other hand, there are important demographic limits to secularism, demonstrating the power of religious demography. The relatively low fertility of secular Americans and the religiosity of the immigrant inflow provide a countervailing force that will cause the secularization process within the total population to plateau before 2043. This represents an important theoretical point in that demography permits society to become more religious even as individuals tend to become less religious over time."

Several RationalWiki website editors have experienced mental health issues amidst the public having a much lower interest their website

In terms of its editor base and content, the website RationalWiki skews left of center politically and the majority of editor base are atheists/agnostics.

On January 15, I published a blog post entitled Donald J. Trump vs. RationalWiki. Donald Trump's election in 2016 was a big blow to RationalWiki in the United States.

In May of 2020, former RationalWiki Foundation board member and admin GrammarCommie reported that: he was cutting himself; he had thoughts of wanting to die and that he had feelings of low self worth.  During this time, the RationalWiki administrator LeftyGreenMario indicated that GrammarComie's mental health crisis was affecting the mental health of the rest of RationalWikians. 

On May 17, 2020, the RationalWiki administrator who goes by the moniker DuceMoosolini, stated that RationalWiki "attracts all sorts of weird people".

On May 24, 2020, the RationalWiki administrator Oxyaena wrote: "it's just that i am probably raging too much most of the time to form coherent sentences."

On May 24, 2020, the RationalWiki editor who goes by the moniker Amassivegay indicated: "I am never sure I am even coherent most of the time."

Google Trends reports the number of Google searches per month for a given search term.  

Below is the Google trends graph RationalWiki and you can see that the number of searches for RationWiki at Google is much lower than its peak in November of 2014. 

Religion: Why faith is becoming more and more popular in the world

 

On August 27, 2018, the British newspaper The Guardian published the article Religion: why faith is becoming more and more popular which indicated:

If you think religion belongs to the past and we live in a new age of reason, you need to check out the facts: 84% of the world’s population identifies with a religious group. Members of this demographic are generally younger and produce more children than those who have no religious affiliation, so the world is getting more religious, not less – although there are significant geographical variations.

Professor Eric Kaufmann, who teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, specializes in the academic area of how demographic changes affect religion/irreligion and politics. Kaufmann is an agnostic.

On December 23, 2012, Kaufmann wrote:

I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious. 

On the other hand, the secular West and East Asia has very low fertility and a rapidly aging population... In the coming decades, the developed world's demand for workers to pay its pensions and work in its service sector will soar alongside the booming supply of young people in the third world. Ergo, we can expect significant immigration to the secular West which will import religious revival on the back of ethnic change. In addition, those with religious beliefs tend to have higher birth rates than the secular population, with fundamentalists having far larger families. The epicentre of these trends will be in immigration gateway cities like New York (a third white), Amsterdam (half Dutch), Los Angeles (28% white), and London, 45% white British.

At a conference Kaufmann said of religious demographic projections concerning the 21st century:

Part of the reason I think demography is very important, at least if we are going to speak about the future, is that it is the most predictable of the social sciences. 

...if you look at a population and its age structure now. You can tell a lot about the future. ...So by looking at the relative age structure of different populations you can already say a lot about the future...

 ...Religious fundamentalism is going to be on the increase in the future and not just out there in the developing world..., but in the developed world as well.

 A study conducted by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life says that Africans are among the most religious people on Earth.

Africa has a high fertility rate and it is seeing a big population boom. According to the Institute For Security Studies: "Africa's population is the fastest growing in the world. It is expected to increase by roughly 50% over the next 18 years, growing from 1.2 billion people today to over 1.8 billion in 2035. In fact, Africa will account for nearly half of global population growth over the next two decades."

The American sociologist and author Peter L. Berger introduced the concept of desecularization in 1999. Berger stated, "One can say with some confidence that modern Pentecostalism must be the fastest growing religion in human history."

The atheist author and advocate David Madison, PhD wrote in March 2019:

 I remain haunted—and terrified—by what I read on a Christian website, not long after the turn of this century: that by 2025, there will be one billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) Pentecostals in the world.

In 2011, Professor Phillip Jenkins published the the 3rd edition of the book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

Chuck Colson, citing the work of Jenkins, writes:

As Penn State professor Philip Jenkins writes in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, predictions like Huntingtons betray an ignorance of the explosive growth of Christianity outside of the West. 

For instance, in 1900, there were approximately 10 million Christians in Africa. By 2000, there were 360 million. By 2025, conservative estimates see that number rising to 633 million. Those same estimates put the number of Christians in Latin America in 2025 at 640 million and in Asia at 460 million. 

According to Jenkins, the percentage of the worlds population that is, at least by name, Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.

Excellent article on atheism

For a comprehensive article on atheism, please read this article: Atheism. 

 Below is a video review of the atheism article.

   

Christians: We're smart enough. Beautiful enough, and doggone it, God loves us!

Map: Zhejiang province in China

IQ map of China (2005)

The region of the world with the highest IQ is a Christian region in China. China's Zhejiang province is China's Christianity heartland. In 2005, the Chinese Journal of Endemiology (Owned by China ‘s ministry of health) reported that Zhejiang province had the highest IQ of all the provinces in China with an average IQ of 115.8 which was markedly higher than China's average IQ at the time which was a score of 103.4 (see: China's Christian heartland: Highest IQ in China and An Increase of Intelligence in China 1986–2012 and The Protestant Work Ethic: Alive & Well…In China by Hugh Whelchel, September 24, 2012). 

In addition, the religious Philippines has had a winning streak in international beauty contests (see: Religious Philippines winning streak in the major international beauty pageants and Atheists and physical attractiveness). In the Philippines, Protestantism/evangelicalism is quickly growing (see: Protestantism: The fastest growing religion in the developing world, Manilla Times, 2017). 

"I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone It, people like me!" - Stuart Smalley

"Christians... We're smart enough. Beautiful enough, and doggone it, God loves us!  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest and most beautiful of all? God and Bible-believing, Christians - hands down!" - Anonymous

"I hope America has a revival. We need to be smarter and thinner!" - Anonymous

Graphic credits:

Source: Zhejiang in China - map

Description	Deutsch: Lage der Provinz XY (siehe Dateiname) in China. English: Location of province XY (see filename) in China
Date	15 September 2011
Source	Own work This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Adobe Illustrator. This file was uploaded with Commonist. This vector image includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this file:  China edcp location map.svg (by Uwe Dedering).
Author	TUBS

License:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Administrator of RationalWiki admits its editors are a "bunch of pearl clutching pansies"

RationalWiki is an atheist/agnostic wiki.

As can be seen above, on May 23, 2020, an administrator of RationalWiki who goes by the moniker Ace McWicked, admitted that its editors are a "bunch of pearl clutching pansies".

The comment was made on its moderation page.


Photo credits:

Source: mynerves - Flick

Flickr account: tigitogs

License: Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Evangelical churches see growth during economic downturns and times of crises. Atheism faces a longstanding trend of global market share loss

 According to the Economist :

Last year David Beckworth, an assistant professor of Economics at Texas State University, examined historic patterns in the size of evangelical congregations and found that, during each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, membership of evangelical churches jumped by 50%.

In 2008, David Gibson wrote in Commonweal:

A recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases there, too. But they were nowhere near as striking as those reported by congregations describing themselves as evangelical, a term generally applied to churches that stress the literal authority of Scripture and the importance of personal conversion, or being born again.Part of the evangelicals new excitement is rooted in a communal belief that the big Christian revivals of the 19th century, known as the second and third Great Awakenings, were touched off by economic panics. Historians of religion do not buy it, but the notion has always lived in the lore of evangelism, said Tony Carnes, a sociologist who studies religion.A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In Praying for Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States, David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University, looked at long-established trend lines showing the growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of mainline churches and found a more telling detail: During each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches continued their decline during recessions, though a bit more slowly.The little-noticed study began receiving attention from some preachers in September, when the stock market began its free fall. With the swelling attendance they were seeing, and a sense that worldwide calamities come along only once in an evangelists lifetime, the study has encouraged some to think big.

“When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.” - Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York’s largest evangelical congregation as quoted in the New York Times article Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches

Excerpt from the academic paper entitled The Changing Face of Global Christianity by Dr. Todd Johnson & Sandra S. Kim:

As Latourette’s Great Century was coming to a close, churches outside of Europe and the Americas that took root in the 19th century grew rapidly in the 20th century.10 Africa, in particular, led this transformation growing from only 10 million Christians in 1900 to 360 million by AD 2000. Given current trends, there could be over 600 million Christians in Africa by 2025. Shortly after 1980, Christians in the South outnumbered those in the North for the first time in 1,000 years. In 1900 over 80% of all Christians lived in Europe and Northern America, however, by 2005 this proportion had fallen to under 40% and will likely fall below 30% before 2050. Projections for the future show that the Christian churches of the Global South (Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania) will likely continue to acquire an increasing percentage of global Christianity...

Another daily reality for Southern Christians is poverty. Much of the global South deals with serious issues of poverty and a lack of access to proper health care. Countries that have been hardest hit by AIDS, such as Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland, are also countries where Christianity is flourishing. Without access to the necessary medical care, accounts of healing and exorcism found in the Bible are taken more seriously. The work of the Holy Spirit exhibited in the ministry of signs and miracles of healing and deliverance from demonic powers has exploded in the ministry of Pentecostal/Charismatic churches in the global South. David Smith describes these churches as “overwhelmingly charismatic and conservative in character, reading the New Testament in ways that seem puzzlingly literal to their friends in the North,” and as “largely made up of poor people who in many cases live on the very edge of existence.”  Thus the growth of Christianity in poorer regions implies not only an alternative reading of the Bible, but a different experience of the Bible.

The atheist author and advocate David Madison, PhD wrote in March of 2019:

I remain haunted—and terrified—by what I read on a Christian website, not long after the turn of this century: that by 2025, there will be one billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) Pentecostals in the world. That should scare us as much as global warming.

The American sociologist and author Peter L. Berger introduced the concept of desecularization in 1999. According to Berger, "One can say with some confidence that modern Pentecostalism must be the fastest growing religion in human history."

Professor Phillip Jenkins published the book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

Chuck Colson, citing the work of Jenkins, writes:

As Penn State professor Philip Jenkins writes in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, predictions like Huntingtons betray an ignorance of the explosive growth of Christianity outside of the West. 

For instance, in 1900, there were approximately 10 million Christians in Africa. By 2000, there were 360 million. By 2025, conservative estimates see that number rising to 633 million. Those same estimates put the number of Christians in Latin America in 2025 at 640 million and in Asia at 460 million. 

According to Jenkins, the percentage of the worlds population that is, at least by name, Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.

Professor Eric Kaufmann, who teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, specializes in the academic area of how demographic changes affect religion/irreligion and politics. Kaufmann is an agnostic. Kaufmann said of religious demographic projections concerning the 21st century and the future growth of religious fundamentalism:

Part of the reason I think demography is very important, at least if we are going to speak about the future, is that it is the most predictable of the social sciences. 

...if you look at a population and its age structure now. You can tell a lot about the future. ...So by looking at the relative age structure of different populations you can already say a lot about the future... 

...Religious fundamentalism is going to be on the increase in the future and not just out there in the developing world..., but in the developed world as well.

The prominent historian Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, indicates that he believes Christianity faces a "bright future" worldwide. According to MacCulloch, "Christianity, the world's largest religion, is rapidly expanding – by all indications, its future is very bright."

On July 24, 2013, CNS News reported:

Atheism is in decline worldwide, with the number of atheists falling from 4.5% of the world’s population in 1970 to 2.0% in 2010 and projected to drop to 1.8% by 2020, according to a new report by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS) in South Hamilton, Mass."

On December 23, 2012, Kaufmann wrote:

I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious. 

On the other hand, the secular West and East Asia has very low fertility and a rapidly aging population... In the coming decades, the developed world's demand for workers to pay its pensions and work in its service sector will soar alongside the booming supply of young people in the third world. Ergo, we can expect significant immigration to the secular West which will import religious revival on the back of ethnic change. In addition, those with religious beliefs tend to have higher birth rates than the secular population, with fundamentalists having far larger families. The epicentre of these trends will be in immigration gateway cities like New York (a third white), Amsterdam (half Dutch), Los Angeles (28% white), and London, 45% white British.

The website Science 2.0 declared on July 14, 2015:

Atheism as a belief system has peaked and its share of humanity is shrinking, demographic studies indicate. Win/Gallup’s 2012 global poll on religion and atheism put atheists at 13%, while its 2015 poll saw that category fall to 11%. Other figures suggest the changes have deep, broad roots. 

First, a community’s possession of atheistic world-views—for whatever reason—correlates with low or negative birth rates. The most significant examples are East Asian and European countries, which are at “below replacement” rates of birth, shrinking at speed. 

Second, “forced” atheism has been disappearing steadily over the past 40 years and we see a corresponding surge of people towards spiritual clusters. In percentage terms, 1970 may be considered the high point for global atheism and agnosticism. As communism weakened, and eventually collapsed in 1989, there was a significant resurgence of religious belief (see chart below). The same thing is now happening in China. 

Third, the surge of popularity for a novel type of “evangelical atheism” which began about a decade ago appears to be losing some of its steam. The movement’s celebrity leaders have fallen out of the bestseller lists, and are often now criticized by their former cheerleaders in newspaper columns. After a high-publicity start in 2013, Sunday Assemblies have plummeted out of the limelight and growth has been glacial. 

And the near future? The latest global data also shows that young people, classified as those under 34, tend to be measurably more religious (66%) than older ones (60%). “With the trend of an increasingly religious youth globally, we can assume that the number of people who consider themselves religious will only continue to increase,” said Jean-Marc Leger, President of WIN/Gallup International Association. 

..the view that atheism will sweep the globe to produce a non-believing utopia is extremely unlikely. The shrinking of the skeptical share of humanity is inevitable, as Welsh geneticist Steve Jones has stated. 

..the data suggests that the global proportion of atheists will fall, while the number of pro-spiritual, pro-science middle group will grow.

Pew Research states: "By 2055 to 2060, just 9% of all babies will be born to religiously unaffiliated women, while more than seven-in-ten will be born to either Muslims (36%) or Christians (35%)."

In 2012, the W. Edwards Deming Institute published a report by the World Future Society which indicated:

In 2100, however, the world will likely be only 9% unaffiliated — more religious than in 2012. The peak of the unaffiliated was in 1970 at around 20%, largely due to the influence of European communism. Since communism’s collapse, religion has been experiencing resurgence that will likely continue beyond 2100. All the world’s religions are poised to have enormous numeric growth (with the exceptions of tribal religions and Chinese folk religion), as well as geographic spread with the continuation of migration trends. Adherents of the world’s religions—perhaps particularly Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists—will continue to settle in the formerly Christian and ever-expanding cities of Europe and North America, causing increases of religious pluralism in these areas. Christians and Muslims together will encompass two-thirds of the global population—more than 7 billion individuals. In 2100, the majority of the world’s 11.6 billion residents will be adherents of religious traditions.

Why the religious will inherit the earth (Part 1) by Eric Kaufmann



Why the religious will inherit the earth (Part 2) by Eric Kaufmann