Book description
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
success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel.
Based on a wealth of demographic research, considering questions of
multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of
the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises - and
what this means for the future of western modernity. Eric Kaufmann is
Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. A
visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School, Harvard, in 2008-9, he is the
author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile 2010) and has
written on religion and demography for Newsweek, Foreign Policy and
Prospect, among others.
