Eric Kaufmann's biological determinism predicts a world of increasing religiosity and increasing conservatism (Prospect, November 2006). His argument rests on two pillars: first, that religious people have more children than secular people, and second, that increased religiosity will lead to increased conservatism in politics. Self-evidently true? Perhaps not.
For Kaufmann, the higher fertility of religious people will "challenge modernism, that great secular movement of cultural individualism which swept high art and culture after 1880 and percolated down the social scale to liberalise attitudes in the 1960s." But did the seeds of the 1960s lie in the high art and culture of the 1880s? Rock 'n' roll was hardly a secular trickle down from 1880s "high art and culture," rather it was a "trickle up" from the, often religious, music of the black people and hillbillies of the southern US. Nor was it the echo of 1880s secular cultural individualism that drove the civil rights movement, but the preaching of the southern Baptists and Martin Luther King. Even LSD, the definitive drug of the 1960s, was popularised by Timothy Leary—who became interested in it while researching Native American religious practices involving the hallucinogenic peyote cactus. The Catholic church's cultural revolution of Vatican II must also be included in the factors contributing to the liberalising tendencies of the 1960s.
Where there were precursors in the 1880s, it was not to be found in secular high art and culture, but often in popular religion. The origins of both the feminist movement and social democracy are inseparably intertwined with the temperance movements of the nonconformist and free churches of the 19th century. And as for individualism, surely the origins of individualism cannot be separated from the Reformation? Even existentialism, that ultimate creed of individualism, has its origins in that Christian idealist, Kierkegaard. (The closest we can get to a purely "secular" cause for the liberalisation of social attitudes in the 1960s is in relation to the sexual revolution that arose from the happy conjuncture of new medical technology and the contraceptive pill.)
Kaufmann's definition of religion, and thus of the implications of increased religiosity, is somewhat limited, circumscribed by his assumption that religion is broadly synonymous with something akin to the religious right in the US. In his quote from Arthur Brooks on fertility rates the term liberal is clearly intended to read secular, and conservative to read religious. His extension of this American understanding of religiosity leads to a key misunderstanding in relation to those "who continue to describe themselves as religious and affiliate with a religious denomination," who constitute around half of the population of Protestant Europe, including Britain. This figure is in serious need of unpacking. For example, the British Social Attitudes survey (1992) discovered that 69 per cent of Britons believe in God, but 80 per cent do not believe God determines our lives, 79 per cent do not believe God gives meaning to life, 72 per cent do not believe in heaven or hell, and 63 per cent do not believe that God is personally concerned with human beings. This is a very Anglican form of belief and stands in stark contrast to the religion of Bible-belt America.
Nor can the correlation between religiosity and conservatism be taken as absolute. In 2004, for example, 58 per cent of Bush voters were regular church attenders—but so were 41 per cent of Kerry voters. In Britain the difference is even more marginal, with 10 per cent of Labour supporters and 13 per cent of Conservative supporters saying they attend church weekly. Interestingly, Labour supporters' weekly church attendance is higher than the British average of 7.9 per cent.
Kaufmann claims that in a more religious world, "religious lobbyists… will ask why the secular point of view on issues like abortion, blasphemy, pornography and evolution is the only one taught, aired or respected." Perhaps, but it is also highly likely that if religion becomes a dominant form of discourse in the future, then liberal politics will articulate itself in religious terms. Some obvious examples spring to mind, such as Earth Ministry, whose mission is to "inspire and mobilise the Christian community to play a leadership role in building a just and sustainable future," or Care of Creation, with a core value of "Exemplary and Christ-like concern for and treatment of people," or the Christian Reformed Church whose 2006 synod "instructed the executive director of the CRC to seek a means by which Christians serving in the US military could lawfully be recognised as conscientious objectors to a particular conflict." In fact, given the discrediting of Marxism, a religious language of social justice could provide a fruitful new discourse for the left. There are clear historical precedents for this.
The link between religion and radical movements is historically undeniable, from the Peasants' revolt riddle "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" to the role of the Anabaptists in the peasant wars in Germany, to the Diggers in the English revolution, to liberation theology in South America. The politics of religious people is not decided by theology, but by political factors. Take the example of two theologically identical churches, the Dutch Reformed church in South Africa and the Dutch Reformed church in the Netherlands, which occupy diametrically opposed poles on the conservative/liberal spectrum. The defining factor is not religious, it is the social conditions in which the believer exists. A further example is provided by a comparison of the politics of two southern Baptists, WA Criswell and Martin Luther King. Their opposing positions on the civil rights question in the 1950s and 1960s clearly owed more to their, and their congregations', respective skin colours and the social implications of that difference in the southern US at that time, than to Baptist theology.
In fact WA Criswell's own life reveals another significant factor: religious conservatism is not itself immune from liberalising social attitudes. In 1956 Criswell addressed a joint session of the South Carolina legislature on the subject of integration: "Let them integrate," he declared, "Let them sit up there in their dirty shirts and make all their fine speeches. But they are all a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up." However, by the time he wrote his autobiography in 1991, he had decided that? "Racism was, is, and always will be an abomination in the eyes of God." Given the fact that throughout his preaching career a defining point of his theology was faith in the literal word of the Bible, it must be assumed that this change of heart was due to non-religious factors.
Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter and policy adviser to President Bush, speaks of "a head-snapping generational change among evangelicals… focused on fighting poverty and Aids in Africa, and… confronting rape and sexual slavery in the developing world." Gerson found that young evangelicals on campuses across the US almost unanimously considered Bono as their model of Christian activism. This is hardly compatible with the big business wing of the Republican party.
Kaufmann foresees an upsurge in "religion as identity" in a future ethnically divided Europe. He points out that "in ethnically divided Northern Ireland, sectarian conflict fuels far higher religiosity than in other parts of Britain." This is correct: church attendance in Northern Ireland is 63.3 per cent, while in Britain, it is only 18.9 per cent. But the wrong comparison is being made. The comparison should be with the Republic of Ireland, which has a very similar church attendance rate of 67.5 per cent—and none of the ethnic divisions of Northern Ireland. What we are seeing here is a common Irish religiosity in contrast to British secularism. Religion and identity have overlapped in Ireland and the Balkans at the end of both the 19th and 20th century, but these are the exceptions, not the rule.
Kaufmann's thesis is, superficially, very convincing, however the reality is rather more complex.
