Memo to the new atheists from one of their own:don't open the champagne just yet.

Atheism is doomed: the contraceptive Pill is secularism's cyanide tablet

 
 
 The 1960s counterculture slogan “make love, not war” could have been invented for the Hutterites, a conservative, pacifist Anabaptist community in the US and Canada. Numbering 400 at the end of the 19th century, when they moved to Dakota on the point of extinction, there are almost 50,000 Hutterites today, despite conversion being extremely rare (they speak an archaic form of High German and live in the middle of nowhere, which makes it unlikely they’ll turn up at your doorstep with a funny grin).

They are not alone. The Mormons continue to grow by 40 per cent every decade, largely thanks to a high birth rate, so much so that by 2080 there will be anywhere between 63 and 267 million Mormons, depending on whether that figure falls to 30 per cent or 50 per cent.

And Evangelical Christians now account for two thirds of white American Protestants, while the ultra-Orthodox account for 17 per cent of British Jewry, but 75 per cent of children.

Across the western world the fertility rate of religious conservatives far outstrips that of non-believers, so much so that modern liberal secularism is endangered. That, anyway, is the thesis of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, a fascinating new book by Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck University, which is published later this month. It may well be one of the most significant books of our era.

It used to be taken for granted that, just as liberal democracy meant the end of history, so it also meant the end of religion. Once people became rich, educated and sexually liberated, they left irrational beliefs and other such nonsense behind.

Christianity declined steadily from the mid-19th century but it wasn’t until the 1960s that European societies were able to fully abandon the emotional baggage of their civilisation’s infancy, and especially its repressive attitude to sex.

But if what Kaufmann is saying is true – and the demographic data suggests it is – then the contraceptive Pill was not so much secular Europe’s liberation as its cyanide tablet.

The good news is that Europe will not become Islamicised (although Kaufmann’s estimate of 20 or 25 per cent is Islamic enough). The bad news (for some) is that it will become Evangelical Protestant instead. This will at least be encouraging for Israel, although whether it will be the same progressive, secular Israel where gays can serve in the military is another matter, as by the second half of the century the ultra-Orthodox will be the majority.

New Atheists comfort themselves with the idea that religious people will continue to drift their way, like rustics to the city, but the figures do not bear this out. It is true that liberal religious people continue to embrace atheism at a rate that alarms the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Methodist Churches, and Reform synagogues. Once religions start to accept secularism and rationality, their young people usually reach the logical conclusion of doubt – unbelief.

More conservative religions do not have that problem. Only 5 per cent of the more traditional Amish leave the faith, and when a community’s birth rate outstrips the national average by 200 or 300 per cent they can easily afford to lose one in 20 of the flock.

While the likes of Richard Dawkins aim their bile at traditional Christianity, fundamentalists are largely immune to their attacks, and become only stronger as the more committed members of the established churches head their way. Those religions that survive will become more conservative.

God alone knows what will happen to the Church of England this century, but we can safely say that the Catholic Church will become smaller but more committed. It will continue to exist at the margins of an atheist-dominated Europe ruled by an increasingly intolerant secular Left.

Widespread anti-religious feeling will only get more intense as the coming demographic changes outlined by Kaufmann appear to ring true, and as Evangelical Christians start to become more significant in, for example, the British Conservative Party.

But that smaller, more orthodox Catholic Church will have a huge inbuilt advantage – what French Canadian Catholics used to call “revenge of the cradle”. Many orthodox Catholics I know have 3 or 4 children – that’s not a recklessly high number, but in a society where the atheist fertility rate is around 1 child per woman, that advantage will show over a few decades, especially since orthodox Catholics have a far smaller drop-off rate than their liberal brethren.

Much as this will anger the New Atheists, which is a plus, Kaufmann’s thesis is disturbing. Personally I prefer Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and Anglican civilisation to some of the wackier strains of Evangelical Christianity. As for fundamentalist Islam…

It’s happened before: Kaufmann believes that Christianity’s rise from 40 followers to 6 million within three centuries had less to do with conversions that with higher birth rates, since the Christians rejected such pagan practises as polygamy and infanticide.

Today we view the ancient world’s attitude to infanticide as barbaric and incomprehensible, but perhaps future generations will look at our attitudes to abortion in the same way – that's not because pro-lifers would have won the argument, simply that (in addition to the effect of the Pill) abortion is killing the atheists of tomorrow.