Today’s topic is very important in the current environment where secularism seems to be the flavour of the month, not only of the month but perhaps for many many decades from the turn of last century until now. It seems that secularism has an upper hand. However there are not only murmurings but lots of activities taking effect from the people who may deem to be believers or let us say religious people, whether they are the fundamentalist Christians in America who are espousing perhaps a different kind of religion from what Christianity was deemed to be.
Then obviously the whole movement in the Islamic world plus also in South Asia, India – Hinduism the BJP and other right-wing parties. So religion is taking some kind of root.
Today we have a good speaker who has done a lot of research and has written a book: Shall the religious inherit the earth?
Eric Kaufmann: Thank you very much Shabir, thanks to Fatema for organising this meeting and thanks to you for braving the Canadian weather. In Canada we have passage ways above ground and underground so we can escape the cold but not here in London. So I prefer the weather from the Persian Gulf.
This book is about the connections between demography and religion. So demography is about population change and how population change can effect religion and through religion politics and history as well.
I want to begin with an overview of what is happening in the world demographically, what is happening to the world population. Sometime towards the end of the current century the population of the world will peak at about nine billion people give or take and then begin to decline. That is actually quite astounding, the idea of world population declining not because of famine or war but because of the individual choices people are making. A peaceful, voluntary population decline.
I believe this is a very significant change in human history because if we were to look at the line of the world’s population beginning sometime about ten thousand years ago it is a pretty flat one. Births and deaths are more or less cancelling each other out.
And then about 1700 the line of the world’s population just spikes up and we are still living through that population explosion. This is caused by the advent of modern medicine, sanitation and modernity so the line in world population is coterminous with modernity.
That is really the great population explosion. And then we are going to be entering into a period of flattening and then ultimately decline which is going to pick up speed and then you can see a period perhaps similar in length to the population explosion of population decline.
This actually has a lot of implications for religion.
We are seeing signs of this decline. It is not evident everywhere in the world but it is evident particularly in Europe. It is also evident in the fact that world’s rural population has already begun to decline because of urbanisation and slower rates of global population growth. In Europe the population including Russia is already in decline from 730million today to roughly 705m in 2030 and then it is projected to decline to about 655m by the year 2050. So you can say in the next 20 years Europe will lose 25bn people. In the following 20 years, up to 2050 they will loose 55m so the speech of the decline populations is increasing over time.
A country where the average woman has 1.3 children it means is that the number of children a woman will bear in her lifetime. It is known as the total fertility rate in roughtly 35 coutnries of the world is at 1.4 or below. That is clearly not enough children to replace two parents, two parents having 1.3 or 1.4 children.
If you have a country like Italy which has a total fertility of 1.3 you could add Spain or many countries in East Asia, North Korea, Hong Kong. After 100 years the population is only a quarter as big as it is today. So you have tremendous shrinking of the population caused by these very low birth rates.
I not saying Europe as a whole has a total ferlitlity of 1.3 – it is maybe 1.5. So the shrinking if not so fast but this is just to say that speed of shrinking accelerat5es over time just as the speed of the population growth accelerates. Why? Because if you have population growth more mothers mean more children so you have that compound effect which leads to logritimic population growth. But the same thing operates in reverse. Fewer children, fewer mother. So that leads to shrinking.
One word also about demography. It is not the same as forecasting the weather or the economy or whether a political leader will step down or be overturned in a coup. Demography is the most predictable of the social sciences. The 50 sometimes of the 20 50s are alive.
You can look at a population and say that it is a very young population- for example in Afghanistan the average age is very young so we know that the population is going to grow very fast in the future, just simply because those people will grow up and there will be many mothers who will give birth to children.
You could look at a society like Japan and clearly there are not many children coming through. Clearly it is an older age structure so the population is going to decline. So we can say a lot about the future just by looking at the age structure of a population today we can read the future. So that is the power of demography.
What is happening if we take the period between now and 2050? It is a transition period,
between the big population explosion of the last 300 years and the great shrinking that will occur in 2080 or towards the end of our century. And in this transition zone you have another part of the world which is the global north of Europe, East Asia and North America where you have an aging population – a shrinking population. Then there is the global south, countries near the equator who have still very high rates of population growth rates, even though those rates are actually coming down.
What his means is you have a big imbalance between growing, surging populations in the tropical, developing parts of the world and at the same time you have an ageing, declining populations in the developed parts of the world.
So for example in 2050 in it predicted that in many countries of Europe 40percent of the population will be over 60. This is unprecedented in human history. We just don’t know what a country or population looks like when 40percent of the people are over 60.
But at the same time too in 2005, we have 65 countries in the world where two-thirds of the population were under the age of 30 – very young. Countries such as Afghanistan and Yemen. These countries are going to move through what is called the demographic transition and family sizes will decline. A good example of this is a country Iran which now has very low fertility but used to have very high. So countries are moving from very high birth rates to low birth rates but it is going to take some time before this happens.
So you have great population pressure. One part of the world needs workers to pay the pension to fill jobs. Another part of the world has to many people to fill too few jobs so you are going to have migration pressure.
To give you an indication of just how dramatic this change is in 1950 there were two and a half Europeans for every African. In 2050, according to UN projections, there will be four Africans for every European. So from two and a half Europeans per African to four Africans per Europe. This is who dramatic the shift in population has been in 100 years.
So the question is what does all this have to with religion?. Lets get back to the ultimate question. What I am arguing is that the way that most people get their religion is through birth. The old fashioned way. They inherit it from their parents. And so that connection between birth and religion is the connection between religion and demography.
We know a lot about patterns of birth in a population. We can say a lot about patterns of religion as well. This also has implications for secularism. There are the ideas of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hickens. This idea that the world is becoming secular and non religious is a very popular theory. It has been a very popular theory for some time but we have to ask what does the shift in global population mean in terms of secularism.
Ninety-seven percent of population growth is taking part in the tropical parts of the world, the global south. These are also parts of the world which are almost entirely religious – that is most the people have a religion, they have religious belief. Whereas the relatively secular, non religious parts of the world such as Europe and East Asia are undergoing population decline.
So you can see that those parts of the world that are growing quickly the fastest are the religious parts of the world and the parts of the world that are declining and aging are the relatively secular parts of the world.
So the share of the globe that is religious is going to have an impact on the process of secularisation. It is going to slow down and ultimately reverse secularisation. Already we see evidence of this.
So according to the world’s religious data base the proportion of the world that has a religious affiliation has increased rather than decreased. So in 1987, 81percent of the people said they had a religion. In 2000 this has increased to 85percent. Part of that is due to the collapse of communism which was explicitly anti-religious. But also a part of that is that the religious parts of the world have expanded much faster than other parts of the world. The projection is that by 2025, 87 percent – so a further increase in the proportion of the world that is religious is projected.
Now one might say this is happening because of global population growth in the developing parts of the world but that doesn’t contradict the secularisation arguments because ultimately in the West, in the developed parts of the world what is happening is secularisation and religious decline. So what is happening our there in the developing world just means that they will get there later.
There are a couple of reasons why I think this is not correct. It is true that if we look around Western Europe and go into a church parishioners will be relatively old there will be a preponderance of grey hair and many of the seats will be empty. So there has definitely been a religious decline and secularisation in the West. I think there is no question about this.
Now there are people who debate this. I think there is a very strong argument, particularly in the past 50 years, that we have seen significant secularisation in the West. However what I talked about before that population pressure between the growing parts of the world and the declining parts of the world is leading to north-south migration.
Migration is reshaping the populations of the West. Many intellectuals see that. They say it is clear that if you look at the city streets of London, Toronto, Sydney (Australia) you can see that the mix is much more multi coloured than it used to be. Ethnic change has definitely occurred. It has occurred for demographic reasons. So people accept that demography can effect ethnicity and national identity.
But what is less noticed in many of these writings is that demography can also change the religious make-up of a population. It can lead to secular populations being replaced by relatively religious ones.
Let me give you and example. In the city of London between 1989 and 2005 two important surveys of religion were taken and they found that low and behold the number of Christians who attended church regularly was roughly the same between 1989 and 2005 but had dropped 40 percent in the rest of England and Wales.
Now how do we explain that Christianity has held so well in London and yet has declined so rapidly in other parts of England and Wales. The answer is very clear. It has to do with demography – migration- and to some extend larger family sizes among immigrant Christians. So we know that upwards of 60 percent of practising Christians in London are non white and even of the remaining 40 percent a large percentage would be Eastern European. So we have a very significant of input from immigration into Christianity in London.
Add to that the fact that mosque attendance in Britain on a weekly basis is at the same level as Church of England attendance on a weekly basis. Plus Sikh and Hindu religious attendance. So you can argue that London is a more religious place today than it was 20 years ago.
That proves my point that demography can reverse secularisation. So you have a more religious city than 20 years ago not because people are finding God but because of immigration and to some extent larger family sizes among immigrants who happen to be religious. So that just leads to the composition of the population becoming more religious.
Now the argument that is often put to me is this is fine, this is true but surely the children will assimilate to the norms of society which are secular norms and the children of the immigrants will become a lot more secular and leave religion.
It is true that for some groups this has occurred. The chidren of the West Indian Pentecosal or Anglican immigrants who came in the 1950’s and 60s to this country many of their children did leave Christianity.. We know this from ethnic minority surveys.
So the parents have about a 50percent attendance rate and the children have about a 30percent attendance rate. So it turns out that this is an exception. Particularly in the non-Christian religions the children are as religious as the parents. So we do not see any shift between the foreign born and the British born generations of the over over 55 and under 18 – 25 age groups. I was going to say Muslims as religious as the parents.
The children are being retained in the religion but at the same time immigration and to some extent higher fertility rates are powering the expansion of these elements of the population. So religion is growing through demography and retention.
Why is this the case? There is a theory. Even secularisation theorists such as Steve Bruson and David Margrin – you may not be familiar with these authors but they are familiar in the literature about secularisation. They say well when you have religion serve as a marker of identity for an ethnic group than the religion can resist the secularisation process.
So for example if you go to northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has an ethnic conflict between British and Irish. British protestants and Irish Catholics. That is the most religious part of the United Kingdom. Why? Because in that ethnic conflict the identity question is so salient in people’s lives so it gives the religion a secular job to do marking out identity. Cultural defense. Defending the ethnic identity.
So too you could argue with Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims in London. In the same way being Muslim is a marker of being Bangladeshi or being Pakistani. So it has that boundary marking function that helps it to gain relevance for younger people. So therefore these religions have done very well in retaining the children within the fold.
Now still people may be sceptical. They may say this may be true but really demography and history doesn’t change politics. It is only events, military and economic shifts. That is really what is important for changing history and politics.
But I would argue that there are at least two contemporary cases where demography has really made an impact in terms of religion. One is the post 1970 Islamic revival and the other is the rise of the new Christian right.
If we take the Islamic revival first there is no doubt that the discredited Arab nationalism, and non-aligned socialism, the six-day War and the end of communism – all these big geopolitical changes did reduce the appeal of secularism in the Muslim world.
But it is also true that this was also a period of large scale migration from the country side to the city. And so you had relatively pious people living in the countryside coming into cities that were relatively secular. This is cities like Tehran, Cairo, Algiers and Istanbul. So you have migration, a demographic process of people moving into the city. And this provides a constituency for Islamic revival.
To some extent demography provides the momentum to defeat what were at one time the secular socialist Arab national cultures in these cities. I am not saying it is the only factor but I am saying it is a contributing factor.
Geo Capel mentions I particular that if you look at this movement from the pious countryside into the city in many cases these individuals form a constituency for emerging groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
The same sort of thing happens in the United States. There was a famous article that was done by a couple of authors who looked at white Protestants in the United States and they said why is that among white American Protestants born in 1900 almost two thirds are members of mainline or relatively moderate Protestant denominations such as Methodist and Baptist.
Why is it that among the older white Protestants most of them are members of mainline moderate denominations but amongst white American Protestants born in 1975 over 60 percent are conservative and Evangelical in their denomination.
A lot of people would say it is because they were born again. They switched from their established mainline denomination towards a more conservative fundamentalist denomination such as the Southern Baptist Convention or Independent Baptists.
What they discovered however was that there hadn’t been that much switching. Much of the change was accounted for by the higher birth rates of the conservative denominations. Roughly one child more on average than the main line denominations maintained through the better part of the 20th century. That was enough to explain three quarters of the shift from the more liberal to the more conservative denominations.
By the time you get to the late 1970s and 1980 of the Moral Majority Jerry Forwell and Ronald Reagan mobilised this constituency into the new Christian right. That occurs post 1980 but it can only occur because there has been a shift and a growth in the evangelical-conservative population. So in both cases I think I would argue that the demography played an important part in boosting a conservative religious revival.
And yet many people will say well again this is a temporary growing pain of modernity. You can look at the Islamic revival and say ‘yes’ there were poor people coming from the countryside to the cities who happened to have large families, who happened to be quite religious but once they are educated and become wealthy they will have smaller families and loose their religiosity.
The same thing happened in the United States. It was people from the Bible Belt in the American south who happened to be poor and who happened to be religious and conservative but as they get educated and wealthy they will become more secular and family sizes will decline.
This is very much the argument of one British author Pipa Norris and one American political scientist Ron Englehart in their book Sacred and Secular. It is quite an interesting book and their argument is that right now the world is becoming more religious because religious parts of the world happen to be poorer, the less educated are religious and have lots of kids. But once those parts of the world develop and people get security they will become less religious and have smaller families.
I think they are right at least in one respect- family sizes will decline. And they already are declining. I mentioned the case of Iran where the average number of children per woman declines from over six in the early 1980s to under 1.7.
That kind of change, not as quickly as in Iran, but that sort of decline is happening throughout the developing world. At least with regard to family size they are correct. But when we look at religion there is no real evidence outside the West that economic development leads to religious decline. So that part of their argument is not correct.
But there is a further problem and that is that even if it were correct one of the assumptions that Englehart and Norris and the secularists make is that religion is pre modern in some sense and that modernity inevitably leads to a more secular outlook in society not only in terms of separation between religion and politics but also in terms of the decline in individuals belief in religion and private piety.
I don’t think that is the case why? Because I don’t think it is purely the case that only secularism is modern. It is also the case that religious fundamentalism is modern. So religious fundamentalism is actually a response to secularism and for that reason my argument is that religious fundamentalism is modern. And that is not a new argument. It has been made by quite a number of others.
So if your religion is inherited sort of unconsciously, if it was part of the air you breathe it was inherited from your parents it may be that those kinds or moderate religious traditions may be sloped off. It might be more plausible that someone with those kinds of religious traditions, when they encounter the charms of secularism, particularly if they arrive in a Western society they may be attracted to secularism and loose their religiosity.
However with religious fundamentalism which is a response to secularism they say we define ourselves explicitly against ‘the other’ which is against secularism. So watch out for the dangers of secularism. Because religious fundamentalism has inoculated its members againist secularism it is much more resistant to being eroded by the processes of modernisation. So it not inevitable that modernisation leads to religious decline because fundamentalism is in some ways inoculated against modernity.
Norris and Englehart’s long term prediction is that the developing world will, ultimately as it develops become less religious and the number of religious children being born in the world will decline so ultimately the world will tip over and become increasingly secular in the very long run.
What my book is suggesting however is something different and that is that in the very long run the world will actually become more religiously fundamentalist. And I want to look at a particular case which exemplifies something that we may see in a hundred years – not imminently but in a hundred years in various parts of the world. That is a demographic expansion of religious fundamentalism. A specific kind of religious fundamentalism based on religious sects which reject modernity. They are not proselytising but they are inward looking and choose bits of their religious tradition which are the most anti-modern: for example individual rights, the rules of women, secularisation freedom of expression and so on.
So certain groups turn inward and grow internally through having large families and keep members within the fold by erecting quite high walls against the outside world. And Israel is really a paradigm case for this kind of demographic growth of religious fundamentalism. Just to illustrate, in the 1950s Jews coming from North Africa and the Muslim world had seven or eight children simply because they came from traditional societies and were poor and so everybody had seven or eight or children.
By the time we get to the present these people are having the same number of children as European Jews – a little over two on average. So their fertility rate and their family size is shrinking as they come into Israel.
However if you look at the ultra-Orthodox European Jews their family sizes have actually increased. Those Oriental Jews had a traditional Jewish faith, not a fundamentalist Judaism, they were attracted by the charms secular Zionism and their birth rates fell. But the growth rates of the ultra-Orthodox who rejected secularism increased by six-and-a-half as recently as the 1980s with family sizes of seven-and-a-half in the 1990s. So they have resisted this demographic transition because there are aware of the challenges of secularism. So modernity does not automatically lead to a decline in family sizes. It can lead to the reverse: active resistance, active reaction against modernity.
Now as a result of this demographic radicalism of the ultra- Orthodox they are rapidly increasing their share of Israel’s Jewish population. In 1960 only several percentage points of Israeli school children were ultra-Orthodox. But today if we look at first graders in the Jewish sector of Israel a third are ultra-Orthodox.
So with three or four times the birth rate of other Jews it is inevitable that the ultra-Orthodox are going to take over the Jewish sector of Israel. We already see this happening. Jerusalem has elected its first ultra-Orthodox mayor. Many non-Orthodox Jews have begun to leave Jerusalem and it has a very different feel as a city today then it did in the 1970s and 80s.
I think Israel is a paradigm case for what we might see in the long run. Not a very secular society. Why? Because in the long run as world population declines, as people have fewer children – not only fewer children but not enough children to replace themselves, the groups that actively resist that decline in birth rates such as the ultra-Orthodox Jews or the Amish or a number of other groups which I will come to in a minute, there increased share of the population will be dramatic. This is not going to happen for some time. It will happen in Israel soonest but I think it will happen elsewhere.
Another example, even though they are not nearly as large as the ultra-Orthodox Jews they have refined the philosophy more than anyone else is the Quiverfall Movement in American neo-fundamentalist Protestantism.
What Quivefrall members dedicate themselves to is God as the family planner. Obviously they are against abortion but family planning is not something that couples should not engage in because really it is up to God how many children you have so no contraception.
The Quiverfall movement has leaders such are Dough Phillips who is the son of Howard Phillips who is one of the leaders of the original neo-Christian right in the 1980s. There is this the main link of the Christian right. Dough Phillips speaks in terms of a 200 year plan for domination of the United States. This is no joke. A 200-year plan for domination of the US simply because he realises that everybody is having smaller and smaller families so if you have a group that is having large families through mathematics, over time, they are going to be able to take over.
In some ways re-Christianise the USA as they see it. They are very good mathematicians. Some of the movement leaders think in terms of men being patriarchs of dynasties of 200,000 people in 200 years simply through each generation having large numbers of children and retaining them in the fold. They have actually begun to influence the mainstream of the conservative movement as well.
We have a quote here in what is a mainstream Catholic journal, First Things in the USA. David Bentley Harvey argues :”Probably the most subversive and effective strategy we might take would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant and defiant child bearing. Given the reluctance of modern men and women to be fruitful and multiply [this is a phrase from the bible] it would not be difficult surely for the devout to accomplish, in no more than a generation or two, a demographic revolution. So demography in the service of religious fundamentalism.
I have talked about Judaism, I have talked about Christianity. The impact of this in Islam is not as strong as it is in those faiths but I would argue it is there nonetheless. For example if you look at the World Values Survey there is a question that says do you believe that shariah should be the exclusive law of the land? And there is a response from most agree to most disagree, ranked on a scale of one to five. Muslim women who believe most strongly that shariah should be exclusively the law of the land have more children than Muslim women who are opposed to this idea that shariah should be the exclusive law of the land.
Even if we control for the incoming education levels the relationship remains very important. But it only holds powerfully in the cities of the Muslim world – not in the countryside. And there is a reason for this which is that in the countryside it is more the case that you have to have a large number of children to work the land. Contraception is not available. For those reasons you need to have a large family. Whether you are a religious fundamentalist or a religious moderate or secular doesn’t make much difference to how many kids you will have.
Whereas in the city you don’t need a large family to work the land, contraception is increasingly available so the size of your family is a choice much more than it was before. It is not governed by circumstances. Because it is a choice values play a much later part – whether you are fundamentalist or not. That is why the phenomena I described is much more prevalent now than it was in the past. That is why we are not all Hitterites for example, having eight kids. So it is something new. It is something that comes with the shift towards smaller family sizes with people choosing the size of their families.
Even if we take Catholicism amongst white Spanish and Catholic women who attend church regularly have about half to three-quarter more children on average than white French or Spanish Catholic women who do not attend regularly.
In Holland the youngest communities with the largest number of children are the orthodox Calvinists Protestant communities in the south of the country.
Again people will say it is true that strongly fundamentalist religious people will have more children but surely they will be lost over time to the mainstream of secular society. I think there is a case to be made that the children of moderate religious people will be lost and we have seen that in the last 50 years. If you think of the Church of England and the Catholic church there have been big declines.
But there is a difference with religious fundamentalists who because they have set their face against the secularist challenge their children are much less susceptible to that. Not only that. Fundamentalists realise there is a challenge. They realise the challenge of secularism so they have been building parallel institutions which can help to insulate their children from the mainstream of society.
Over the course of the 20th century amongst American Protestants – not only American but Protestants world-wide – there has been the emergence and growth of a network of bible colleges and divinity schools. In Islam there is the system of orthodox madrasas. In orthodox Judaism yeshevas and kolals allow men to continue studying into their 40s.
Also there is residential segregation of the ultra Orthodox. They weren’t actually residentially segregated from other Jews in the 1950s and 60s but they began to congregate in Mer Shalam and Meir Bracht, two centres of orthodoxy but increasingly now in other areas around Jerusalem.
This is also the case with the Amish, an old Anabaptist sect. Their degree of segregation has increased greatly in the 20th century and actually that helped them reduce their membership loss. So both the orthodox and the Amish both have very large families and very low membership loss. Simply by having very large families and limiting membership loss they are able to increase very rapidly. The Amish are the fastest growing American religion. It is not the mega churches. Here is a population that numbered 5,000 in 1900 and numbers about 250,000 today. The doubling time is 20 to 25 years. That is astounding that kind of population growth is really remarkable.
This institution building extends even to religious shopping malls, hotels and beaches replicating the main stream society but keeping members within an increasingly sophisticated network.
It is true that these strong religions demand more of their members in terms of time and money. But that is not a negative thing. In many cases it is a positive because you have invested so much of your time and money in a religious sect it is harder to leave it. You can step away from an Anglican church or a reform Jewish synagogue quite easily because it is a small part of your life but if you are an ultra orthodox Jew or a member of a neo-fundamentalist Protestant group or in Islam a Salafaist movement then that is really your life, that is your social network.
In the words of one rare defector from ultra orthodox Judaism she remarks :”When I made a telephone call on a Jewish holiday I felt as though I was tearing apart one of my vital organs. I felt as though I was foolishly opening the door to hell and sending myself into a wilderness where hope for survival was grim. I felt as though I was separating myself from the group which had raised and supported me and which I had grown to love”.
In other words it is not just a particular thing you do on a Sunday. This is your family, your friends your identity. If you cut off yourself off from that you cut yourself off from your own past and your family probably won’t speak to you again. It is a much bigger decision to leave this kind of sect then to leave the mainstream. So this helps to keep members within the fold. It is a combination of tighter boundaries with strong population growth in an environment where everybody else is having small populations. Populations are declining and shrinking. Against that back drop if you are able to maintain or grow then your share of the total population will increase.
So for example if the fundamentalists are having even two children on average and everybody else is having one then their advantage over the rest of the population is 100percent. If fundamentalists are having five kids while everyone else is having four which kind of used to be the case that is not much of an advantage. It is only a 25percent advantage.
This is just to point to the fact that if everyone else has fewer children and you are able to buck that trend as the population shrinks the significance of the fundamentalists increases. And that is why in the long run I think Israel is a better paradigm case then some of the secular societies of Western Europe in terms of saying what is going to happen long term with this interplay between demography and religion.
What is the significance of all of this? Well first of all there is a political significance. The growth of religious fundamentalist populations has and will reshape politics. Again the election of the ultra orthodox mayor changed the balance of power in the Knesset. It is going to be much harder to achieve a lands for peace type settlement in Israel because much of the ultra orthodox population has spilled over the green line into East Jerusalem.
They didn’t used to be particularly partisan on this issue but they are becoming increasingly hawkish on the question of lands for peace. But also in terms of personal issues, death marriage, burial, conversion, in Israel it is very difficult to find a burial plot unless you are okay with an orthodox rabbi. So you have Israel becoming an increasingly religious and this is infringing on the freedoms of secular Israelis to a greater and greater extent.
In the US it is not the case that the religious right has been able to infringe heavily on secular freedoms. However it is true that if you want to be elected particularly in the Republican Party you have to have a perfect score with the Christian coalition. It is very difficult to get an abortion in Bible belt states. The influence of religious rhetoric in politics has increased markedly since the 1980s.
So there in many ways you see the encroachment or increase in the volume of religious rhetoric.
It is also true in the Muslim world in a case like Pakistan. Even though political Islamists have not succeeded in wining power and there have been very few Islamic revolutions the agenda of shariah in countries such as Pakistan and Egypt propelled by Islamist movements has increased and this has had repercussions on the freedom of religious minorities such as the Copts in Egypt or the Shia in Pakistan. The freedom of individuals to leave religion and the freedom of secular intellectuals to express themselves has been infringed. So culturally a much more puritanical environment in many parts of the core of the Muslim world is emerging.
So this has political implications. But I think it also has wider implications for the direction of modernity. The whole question of secularisation and modernity for Karl Marx, for Sigmund Freud for many of the writers and theorists of modernity and going to back to Voltaire and the writers of the enlightenment they assumed that humans were becoming more rational, more secular and in this way becoming more modern. That is the way that society was moving.
But I think this is certainly not something that we can see as inevitable because clearly all of the demographic forces that I have described are moving in the opposite direction towards not only a more religious society but ultimately a more religiously fundamentalist society. And this is perhaps more in accord with a view of historical development and of modernity which says actually the road winds: it can wind in a conservative direction or in a liberal direction.
Some of you might be familiar with the work of John Grey who is based at the LSE. He has written a lot about this whole issue and says we are not inevitably moving towards the end of history defined by liberal democracy and secularism. It is possible that this is just a bend in the road of the last – you could think of it in 50 year terms or perhaps since the enlightenment 250 years ago. But it is equally possible that the next 50 or 250 years could see societies moving in a very different direction, perhaps a more religious and conservative one.
So we can’t take this linear view of modernity as moving inevitably in a liberal rational secular direction. You actually have to think perhaps there are going to be multiple trajectories in which modernity can play itself out.
I see secularism as having engendered a demographic contradiction. It leads to low fertility rates and the decline of religion but it also leads to the religious fundamentalist response which is also expressed in terms of a resistance to that decline in birth rates and therefore a demographically driven religious revival. In some ways this revival of religious fundamentalism is engendered by the success of secularism. It is kind of the contradiction of secularism.
So it remains to be seen whether liberal secularism can surmount these demographic contradictions.
