Growth of religious fundamentalism

Amish youth groups from Davies County, IN, and Lancaster County, PA, visit Behalt as part of their preparing to make the decision of whether or not to join the Amish community on a long term basis (namely, their adulthood).

Religious fundamentalism has risen to worldwide prominence ever since the 1970s.[1] In 1970, the percentage of the global population which are atheists began to shrink also (see: Desecularization and Global atheism).

Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and author. His academic research specialty is how demographic changes affect religion/irreligion and politics.

According to Kaufmann: "It will be a century or more before the world completes its demographic transition. There is still too much smoke in the air for us to pick out the peaks and valleys of the emerging social order. This much seems certain: without a new [secular liberal] ideology to inspire social cohesion, fundamentalism cannot be stopped. The religious shall inherit the earth."[2]

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.[3]

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Dr. Steve Turley wrote:

“  |  According to University of London scholar Eric Kaufmann’s detailed study on global demographic trends, we are in the early stages of nothing less than a demographic revolution. In Kaufmann’s words, "religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world." There is a significant demographic deficit between secularists and conservative religionists. For example, in the U.S., while self-identified non-religionist women averaged only 1.5 children per couple in 2002, conservative evangelical women averaged 2.5 children, representing a 28 percent fertility edge. Kaufmann notes that this demographic deficit has dramatic effects over time. In a population evenly divided, these numbers indicate that conservative evangelicals would increase from 50 to 62.5 percent of the population in a single generation. In two generations, their number would increase to 73.5 percent, and over the course of 200 years, they would represent 99.4 percent. The Amish and Mormons provide contemporary illustrations of the compound effect of endogamous growth. The Amish double in population every twenty years, and projections have the Amish numbering over a million in the U.S. and Canada in just a few decades. Since 1830, Mormon growth has averaged 40 percent per decade, which means that by 2080, there may be as many as 267 million Mormons in the world, making them by 2100 anywhere from one to six percent of the world’s population.

In Europe, immigration is making the continent more religiously conservative, not less; in fact, London and Paris are some of the most religiously dense areas within their respective populations. In Britain, for example, Ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews constitute only 17 percent of the Jewish population but account for 75 percent of Jewish births. And in Israel, Haredi schoolchildren have gone from comprising a few percent to nearly a third of all Jewish pupils in a matter of five decades, and are poised to represent the majority of the Jewish population by 2050. Since 1970, charismatic Christians in Europe have expanded steadily at a rate of 4 percent per year, in step with Muslim growth. Currently, Laestadian Lutherans in Finland and Holland’s Orthodox Calvinists have a fertility advantage over their wider secular populations of 4:1 and 2:1 respectively.

In contrast, Kaufmann’s data projects that secularists, who consistently exemplify a low fertility rate of around 1.5 (significantly below the replacement level of 2.1), will begin a steady decline after 2030 to a mere 14 to 15 percent of the American population. Similar projections apply to Europe as well. Kaufmann thus appears to have identified what he calls "the soft underbelly of secularism," namely, demography. This is because secular liberalism entails its own “demographic contradiction,” the affirmation of the sovereign individual devoid of the restraints of classical moral structures necessitates the freedom not to reproduce. The link between sex and procreation having been broken, modernist reproduction translates into mere personal preference. It thus turns out that the radical individualism so celebrated and revered by contemporary secular propagandists is in fact the agent by which their ideology implodes.[4]

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## Growth of pentecostalism[edit]

Members of the Pentecostal Church of God in Lejunior, Kentucky praying for a girl in 1946.

See also: Pentecostalism

The American sociologist and author Peter L. Berger introduced the concept of desecularization in 1999.[5][6] According to Berger, "One can say with some confidence that modern Pentecostalism must be the fastest growing religion in human history."[7]

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.[8]

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## See also[edit]

* Growth of evangelical Christianity
* Growth of global desecularization
* Acceleration of 21st century desecularization
* Religion and its projected increase in the 22nd century
* Historical examples of the exponential growth of Christianity

## Notes[edit]

1. ↑ [https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.32.061604.123141 The Rise of Religious Fundamentalism, Annual Review of Sociology, 2006, Vol. 32:127-144
2. ↑ The Stork Theory By Allan C. Carlson, February 28, 2018
3. ↑ Eric Kaufmann - Religion, Demography and Politics in the 21st Century
4. ↑ (source: Text below the YouTube video Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth and the text was written by Dr. Steven Turley).
5. ↑ Journal of Church and State, Desecularization: A Conceptual Framework by Vyacheslav Karpov, 2010
6. ↑ Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L. Berger (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999)
7. ↑ Pentecostalism – Protestant Ethic or Cargo Cult?, Peter Berger, July 29, 2010
8. ↑ How Christianity is Growing Around the World by Chuck Colson