JPR News archive
The Impact of Religion on Europe’s Future

Introducing his paper, Eric Kaufmann considered whether the world was becoming more or less religious. Were cultural forces leading to the rise or fall of religion? Kaufmann stressed the importance of demographic forces at work in Western Europe, such as immigration, fertility, and the decline in Europe’s native populations. If one ethnic group could replace another by immigration, a religious population could equally replace a secular population.

 

Today, in the world at large, the demographic growth of religious populations overwhelms that of the secular society, he said. This is true for Western Europe as well, at least at present, but will not necessarily hold for the future. He quoted statistics from the USA showing higher fertility rates in the more religious population, which corresponded strongly with voting patterns. Research shows that the same dynamics may be at work in Western Europe.

 

According to Kaufmann, societies such as Britain, France and Scandinavia show a steady decrease in the secularization process until it flattens out at the present rate of 5 per cent who attend services on a weekly basis. Nevertheless, the number of people who consider themselves religious still reaches a surprisingly high 50 per cent. As Kaufmann demonstrated, even though religious decline continues today, it does so at a much slower pace than before.

 

Whereas in the past voting patterns were mainly determined by ethnicity, which was in strong correlation with religious affiliation, Kaufmann predicted that a shift could occur—the dominant factor in the future being whether one is religious or secular. In the United States, the dominant cultural cleavage used to be that between Catholics and Protestants, which strongly influenced American politics until the 1960s. Subsequently, divisions started to appear across denominations along conservative/liberal lines. It was plausible, Kaufmann argued, that in Western Europe too, religious Muslims and Christians would make common cause, at least on certain issues, in opposition to the secularised world.

 

Responding to Kaufmann’s presentation, David Voas agreed that religious people generally had more children and were more conservative in their political attitudes. However, he distinguished between the ‘heroic’ fertility of very orthodox groups and that of the general population. Voas pointed out that Eric Kaufmann had assumed an inter-generational transmission, whereby religious parents would have religious children who, in turn, would pass on their tradition to their children. However, Voas contended that this was not supported by the European experience of the last hundred years. He argued that the rate of secularization had not flattened out and that even if the religious population remained stable, society on the whole would probably become more secular nonetheless.

 

Voas agreed that immigration, especially from Eastern Europe and outside Europe, could influence the religious, and possibly even political, character of European society. These changes would depend on whether immigration continues unabated or is curtailed in the future, and their impact would be minor or oppositional, he predicted. At the same time, he could not see religious Christians and Muslims ‘uniting’ against the secular population.

 

In the ensuing discussion, it was noted that cooperation between the various religious groups seemed quite unlikely in the future. David Voas contended that the Catholic/Protestant ethnic divide was still significant in the USA and that it cut across the political parties. He thought there could be a convergence with the native population not only in the fertility rates of the immigrant society but also in their degree of religious commitment. This, however, would be a slower process that would not reveal itself in the second generation, on which Kaufmann focused his research, but only in the longer term.

 

The discussion also focused on Kaufmann’s argument that secularism seemed to have lost its way and was no longer attracting the children of religious Europeans. As Kaufmann points out in his paper; ‘One might surmise that this results from both the lack of a galvanizing secularist project and the religious mobilization against secularism.’