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Eric Kaufmann

Eric P. Kaufmann

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-first Century Paperback – April 19, 2011

by Eric Kaufmann (Author)

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Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their s

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Profile Books
Publication date

April 19, 2011
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

1846681448
ISBN-13

978-1846681448
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Eric Kaufmann
77
Paperback
22 offers from $2.89

Eric Kaufmann
77
Paperback
22 offers from $2.89

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Brilliant and provocative. . . .A book every liberal should read."—John Gray

"Kaufmann is controversial, highly informative, and thought provoking. A not-to-be-missed contribution to one of the most pressing and complex debates of modern time."—Morning Star

About the Author

Eric Kaufmann, an American academic, is currently Reader in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2008-9, he was a Fellow at the Belfer Center, Harvard University. He is a frequent contributor to Prospect and other publications.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Profile Books; Main edition (April 19, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1846681448
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1846681448
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,893,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,516 in History of Religion & Politics
- #4,811 in Church & State Religious Studies
- #5,754 in Comparative Religion (Books)

Customer Reviews:
26 ratings

About the author

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Eric Kaufmann

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Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin, October 2018). He has also written Changing Places: mapping the white British response to ethnic change (Demos 2014), Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth: demography and politics in the twenty-first century (Profile 2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the decline of dominant ethnicity in the United States (Harvard 2004) and two other books. He may be found on twitter at @epkaufm and on the web at www.sneps.net.

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This Is a Challenging and Difficult Book to Read, But It's Vitally Important

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2019

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Read with caution: This is a challenging and thought-provoking book that is either alarming or exciting, depending on your point of view.

The basic treatise is that the super-religious—that is, fundamentalists of all faiths—will be in control of government and culture worldwide within 50 years or so simply because they are having more babies than the less-religious or non-religious. Demographics trumps everything as religious fundamentalism is on course to take over the world, including the United States, simply because these devout, fervent believers will be in the majority. This will have a profound and lasting effect on women's rights, reproductive rights, gay rights, and possibly our freedom of speech.

Written by Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, this is a highly academic tome—just so you know if you choose to read it. (It was recommended to me by a friend who read it as part of his studies for a Ph.D. in political science at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.)

Kaufmann delineates our current society, especially the United States, into three parts:
• Religious fundamentalists, which include evangelical Protestant Christians, ultra-Orthodox Jews (also known as Haredi Jews), traditionalist Catholics, Hispanic Catholics, Mormons, Old Order Amish, and Islamic fundamentalists.

• The "mushy middle" or moderates, which include anyone who identifies with one of the mainline Catholic-Anglican-Protestant churches, Reform Jews, and Muslims.

• The liberal seculars, who are not religious and rarely or never attend worship services, although they may still believe in God. They favor social equality, a liberal democracy, political freedom, and the separation of church and state.

This is a challenging, difficult, and somewhat dense book to read. It is filled with statistics, and the footnotes and index comprise about 40 percent of the book. If you choose to read it, it will take time and a bit of work. But it's worth it! This book is vitally important and provocative as it portends our future through the lens of demographics.

5 people found this helpful

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Edward Brynes

Yes but think very hard

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2020

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This book offers a convincing argument that certain sects generally considered “extremist” will overpower their moderate brethren, not in a Holy War, but simply by multiplying. The intellectual classes of these sects see fruitfulness as a way of pushing back against the dominant secular sociey. The author’s tone is calm and unrelentingly factual, to the point that many readers may feel overburdened with information.

Not much statistical argument is needed for the author to make a convincing case. The most important growth statistic relating to a population is the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), the average number of children born to a woman. For a religious population, desertions weigh on the negative side of the balance. But “Fertility alone is not enough. The Children of God and the Family are two [recent] cults with exceptionally high fertility. The Family, surely the ego ideal of the Shakers, subscribe to the idea that God’s love takes erotic form and practice ritualized communal sex. But its free-love ethos and lack of clear boundaries with the rest of society proved its undoing. The second generation deserted in droves.” (p. 42)

Secularism, the general skepticism about religion and its claims, has been increasing in the West for hundreds of years. But for the conservative sects described in this book, secularism seems to provide a necessary boundary for them to push against and mark off their separation. Worldwide, birthrates after WW II have generally decreased, in a trend known as the Second Demographic Transition (SDT). Doctrinal moderateness generally spells extinction. This is the reason why so many conservative religious groups do not moderate either their beliefs or their fertility. They increase their numbers not by making converts, but by endogenous growth, which means marrying within the faith and having three, four, or more children who do not leave the sect because of the high social cohesion -- for a member, no social life exists outside of it. All of this is in agreement with an argument by Daniel Bell put forward in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

In addition to the Mormons, there are the Hutterites, who have grown from a population of about 400 in the 1880s to 50,000 today; and the Mennonites, Amish and others who are part of a sect called Anabaptists who originated in the European reformation and migrated to the US in the nineteenth century. Their general social philosophy is modelled on the Apostles of the New Testament: “The whole body of believers was united in heart and soul. Not a man of them claimed any of his possessions as his own, but everything was held in common, while the apostles bore witness with great power to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus.” (Acts 4:32) Hutterites and many other Anabaptists have a language of their own, the German spoken in the land of their origin.

Although the author’s principal interest is American religious conservatism, he also deals with Europe. Here the established faiths are divided into mainline and conservative: Calvinism in Holland and Lutheranism in Finland. They too grow endogenously. But there are recent denominations of American origin like evangelicals, Pentecostalists, and charismatics who do not conform so closely to the pattern. “In effect, Christianity seems to be retrenching: religious decline is taking place, but as the loosely attached fall away, they reveal a vital and growing core of fundamentalist energy. As elsewhere, the moderate middle is being squeezed out.” (p.159) Muslims in Europe are covered from a sociological point of view. Their TFR is well above native Europeans, although it is declining (as the native TFR is declining). The author discusses their poverty, unemployment, and criminality, but not heterodox religious beliefs. (This book appeared in 2010.)

The author provides an extensive discussion of the Jewish Haredim or ultra-Orthodox. They began as a reaction to secularization in Europe after the Enlightenment. Many of their customs marking their distinctiveness are of recent date, the nineteenth century. Shortly after Israel was established in 1948, few of them remained in Israel, from the Holocaust. In Israel they “were forced to beg cap-in-hand to the state.” But they gained prestige as the years went by, and today they are supported by the state in a comprehensive system that supports them in their official capacity as students (although with their high TFR they seem implausible). To many Israelis they are seen as representing a more authentic Judaism, while at the same time they are seen as socially parasitic. The author spends many amusing pages on how this highly visible cultural bloc compels businesses to withdraw ads -- for example, a picture of a dinosaur implies promotion of the theory of evolution, so that people feel compelled to take their point of view into account.

The last chapter is a meandering summary of trends and possible developments. The author sees a general “pronatalist” trend in world society, now that the dangers of possible demographic extinction are apparent if not real. Rather inconclusively he speculates about “secular religions” that might replace socialism and anarchism. He considers that there might be evolutionary advantages in religion, then ends with the following: “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 an ideology to inspire social cohesion, fundamentalism cannot be stopped. The religious shall inherit the earth.”

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Lewis Woolston

Hard data and hard conclusions

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2012

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I have had a long fascination with extremist religious groups and love reading good books about them. I was interested in this book after reading about the quiverfull movement and i was not dissapointed by the author's work. The author uses hard scientific data to analyze population demographics amongst religious and secular populations and comes to the conclusion that the religious really will inherit the earth. As much as Dawkins and other opponents of religion might like to fantasize about a secular society where science and reason guide us to a bright future even they would have to acknowledge the hard scientific data in this book. To put it simply....demography doesn't lie and birthrates are the most accurate predictions of the future. An excellent book which will really make you think about the state of western civilization in the next 50 to 100 years.

8 people found this helpful

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Francoise

How Kindle destroys reading pledasure.

Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2017

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Terrific nook ... In HARD copy! Too bad my kindle devices are such Rube Goldberg nightmare that do more to obstruct and destroy my reading pleasure than to encourage it. It's enough to make a book lover hate reading. The problem with my Kindle books is the Rube Goldberg nightmare called a Kindle reader guaranteed to kill anyone's pleasure for reading.

3 people found this helpful

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Aphrahat

Good Disinterested demographic look at religions.

Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2012

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Kauffman gives a superbly well researched and referenced look into how demographic trends will travel in the future and the large roles religion will play in these trends.

He gives an impartial, unbiased analysis which would be difficult on such a contentious subject. Highly recommended for anyone interested in getting a fact based glimpse into the future of religion and society in the 21st century.

7 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Chris X

Wonderful read!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 25, 2020

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Interesting topic for the future and it's implications.

One person found this helpful

Martin Oliver

Rewarding

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 17, 2016

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An excellent book. I fully encourage readers to note the review that has been left here on Amazon by Dr Michael Blume, an expert on the subject matter. As years go by, I feel this book is gaining in importance and relevance, and Mr Kaufman is more often being cited in news and media. A rewarding read.

One person found this helpful

Dr. Michael Blume

A must-read for anyone interested in politics, religion, sciences

Reviewed in Germany on April 19, 2010

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Studying the (on average) higher fertility of religious populations from an evolutionary perspective for some years, I have been somewhat sceptical about applying such observations in the contemporary field of political analysis. But Eric Kaufmann did the job. Making clear his own, rather secular position, he is nevertheless avoiding biasses or polemics, but is informing the reader. He manages to do this by patiently combining available demographic data, historical descriptions and case studies on a wide range of populations as i.e. Haredim Jews in Israel, Mormons in the US, strong Calvinists in the Netherlands, Salafist movements in the Muslim world and many more. Although he is discussing projections and problems, Kaufmann doesn't fall into the trap of mindless alarmism, carefully weighing further options for secular und moderate religious movements, too. Although my interest started from the purely empirical and evolutionary side, I began to like the book for its political and philosophic clout in presenting tough questions and tentatively probing for new answers. For almost any reader, this will be a captivating and thought-provoking read and for scientists from different fields a chance to discuss, test and revise or expand sound observations and hypotheses.

5 people found this helpful

Tanler

The Impact of Religious Communities on Politics

Reviewed in Canada on August 13, 2019

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Although somewhat dated, Kaufmann foresaw that the growth of conservative religious communities in the US would have an increasing impact on the outcome of American elections and, at a certain point, they will cut across divisions of race, ethnicity and class. The role they played in the election of Donald Trump is often overlooked.