Why Secular Liberals aren't the Wave Of The Future

USA Today has an excellent summary of how secular liberals are so self-absorbed that they aren't having children [oops, my spin!] and how religious fundamentalism and social conservatism may be the result of child-bearing by religious conservative adults.

I blogged Philip Longman's article on Patriarchy in Foreign Policy a while back, and this article is a reprise of some of its themes. Longman points to

"a pattern found throughout the world, augering a far more conservative future — one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families.

Along with noting that statistics in the US and Europe show citizens who embrace secular values to the exclusion of religion and traditional customs reproduce at a far lower rate, Longman points to the probable consequences of such a trend:

This correlation between secularism, individualism and low fertility portends a vast change in modern societies. In the USA, for example, nearly 20% of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of people who did raise children.

This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Among states that voted for President Bush in 2004, the average fertility rate is more than 11% higher than the rate of states for Sen. John Kerry. It might also help to explain the popular resistance among rank-and-file Europeans to such crown jewels of secular liberalism as the European Union. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify themselves as "world citizens" are also less likely to have children.

Longman asks an interesting question:

Why couldn't tomorrow's Americans and Europeans, even if they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded households, turn out to be another generation of '68? The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of society married and had children. Some had more than others, but there was much more conformity in family size between the religious and the secular. Meanwhile, thanks mostly to improvements in social conditions, there is no longer much difference in survival rates for children born into large families and those who have few if any siblings.

Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents' values, as often happens. But when they look for fellow secularists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born. Many will celebrate these developments. Others will view them as the death of the Enlightenment.

This puts the secularists' monopoly of academic faculties at higher ed institutions which shrilly insist their students should embrace secular values and resist received opinion into perspective: these barren secularists want intellectual progeny.