American Trends Away From Radical Secularism

Fire of Liberty

Michael Barone has a good column on why the United States will survive the secular storm that has watered down or destroyed the religious communities throughout Europe. Of all of Barone's arguments for why the United States, the one that caught my eye the most is the one on in which he correlated used the rise of birthrates to explain how a nation continues to remain a religious nation. Here's Barone's argument:

Who inherits the future? In free societies, each generation makes its own religious choices, but people tend to follow the faith of their parents. Secular Europe, with below-replacement birthrates among non-Muslims, could be headed for a Muslim future, as historian Niall Ferguson suggests.

In the United States, as pointed out by Phillip Longman in The Empty Cradle and Ben Wattenberg in Fewer, birth rates are above replacement level largely because of immigrants. But, as Longman notes, religious people have more children than seculars. Those who believe in "family values" are more likely to have families.

This doesn't mean we're headed to a theocracy: America is too diverse and freedom-loving for that. But it does mean that we're probably not headed to the predominantly secular society that liberals predicted half a century ago and that Europe has now embraced.

As I noted in previous posts, the Europeans are running the Western Tradition and Christianity into the ground with its ever-increasing devotion to secularism and relativism. Trust me, that's the main reason why the College of Cardinals selected Benedict XVI. The leaders of the Church know full well what awaits Europe if it doesn't stem the tide of these forces. One only has to look at the problems in the Netherlands to understand what awaits Europe some 40 to 50 years down the road. Hopefully the people in the US have seen the mess that is developing in Europe and have decided that freedom and our traditions are too precious to be thrown into the evil blackhole known as extreme secularism. We'll see. Luckily we have individuals like Michael Barone to provide such valuable insights on our culture and its trends.