Religion

Religion

The USA still lags far behind Europe in terms of atheistic belief, however. It will be another century before America reaches the same level; even longer for certain parts of Asia. Even then, a small percentage of citizens will continue to worship a God (or Gods), well into the next millenium. These people will tend to be those who reject science and technology, or have purposefully chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of the world[1].

As the 2012 presidential election grows closer, voter demographics will grab ever more airtime. In a finely balanced electorate, switching parties is less common, making internal growth of party bases more important. Getting the vote out is one aspect of this; population change another. Three or four decades ago, most Americans had trouble specifying which party was conservative or liberal, or matching them to issue positions. No longer. What's more, as Robert Cushing and Bill Bishop observe in The Big Sort, partisanship affects where people choose to live. Robert Putnam and David Campbell add that politics often determines where they go to church. Thus NPR's Ray Suarez relates that a scout leader he met moved from the Episcopalians to become a Mormon because he didn't want to beassociated with a “fag church.”[2] Over time, though, switching declines and battle lines solidify. As theology, ideology, and political party line up, switching becomes less important and the religious and political market is driven more by population shifts. This is not only true in the United States, but in a growing number of societies around the world.

All of which explains why pundits' interest in demography has been steadily rising. Ruy Teixeira, for instance, claims that the growth of the college-educated, secular and Hispanic proportion of the population will soon provide the Democrats with an inbuilt electoral majority. Chris Bowers of the Nation styles this the “End of Bubba Dominance.”[3] On the other side of the ledger, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks highlights the role of fertility: “Liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result.” “In Seattle,” adds Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, “there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs.”[4]

Projections show secularism losing momentum and beginning to decline in both Europe and America by 2050, largely because of low fertility and religious immigration.

In order to adjudicate between these competing predictions, I teamed up with Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon, two leading Austrian-based experts in the art of projecting the size of subgroups in populations. The results, published in the journal Population Studies, show that Democrats are only marginally younger than Republicans and Republican womenbear the same number of children as their Democratic sisters. Immigration, however, is an important factor. If ethnic party identification remains as it is, Latino population growth will benefit the Democrats, shifting the balance between the two ...