The Religious Implications of a Global Fertility Crash
Demography affects us all. It involves the expanding and shrinking of populations and the composition of those populations. Conservative commentator Mark Steyn likes to say that "demography is destiny." It defines our lived experience at the level of family formation all the way up to geopolitics. Of course, it also has a massive impact on religion and the Church.
Fertility rates predict the future. Who is having kids? Who is not having kids? You can prophesy the future with decent accuracy if you know this information.
Who is having kids in 2020? Africans are having a lot of kids. Undeveloped countries are having kids. Lower IQ populations are having kids.
Who is not having kids in 2020? Europeans are not having kids. Developed countries are not having kids. High IQ populations are not having kids.
BBC News published a report about our "jaw-dropping global crash in children being born." Developed high IQ populations in Europe and East Asia will be cut in half by 2100. Italy's population will collapse from 61 million to just 28 million. Japan's population will decline from 128 million to 53 million. Half of China's 1.4 billion people will disappear.
Meanwhile, Nigeria's population will quadruple to 781 million, and all of sub-Saharan Africa will experience a similar surge.
The US population will increase slightly due to a huge influx of lower IQ immigrants, and mass immigration is what the BBC advocates as a partial solution to population decline. However, this "solution" also brings with it a multitude of problems. The BBC report quotes Prof Christopher Murray:
"We will have many more people of African descent in many more countries as we go through this. Global recognition of the challenges around racism are going to be all the more critical if there are large numbers of people of African descent in many countries."
America's 2020 race riots are likely part of a long term trend in which developed nations struggle to adjust to shifting racial dynamics.
What does this mean for religion and the Church?
Developed countries tend to be more secular and non-religious. Undeveloped countries tend to identify more with religion. Sub-Saharan Africa is a bastion of Christianity in various, often weird, forms, and this is the population set to grow the most and migrate everywhere. The most religious populations are growing as a percentage of the global total, and the least religious are declining. The world is getting more religious.
However, our new and more religious world will probably not be pleasant. As high IQ populations shrink, and people from the Third World migrate to replace them, developed nations will experience declining living standards. Crime will likely rise. This is a prediction of the future, but it is also an observation of the present. London is now less than half white, and the city is growing more religious and socially conservative as poverty and crime rise. Why? Because lower IQ immigrants bring their faith and dysfunction with them.
I am not disparaging immigrants for having, on average, lower IQs than the native populations of developed countries. There is an argument to be made that white people have actually attained an unnatural and dysfunctional level of intelligence and development. Evidence for this can be found in their collective societal suicides through birth control, abortion, homosexuality, falling marriage rates, and low fertility.
Perhaps God never designed human society to operate at our present level of development. Perhaps he built into humanity a low fertility mechanism to cap human development. Or, perhaps he is simply suppressing our fertility in order to drag us back down to a reasonable position before we innovate obscene post-human technologies. I see precedent for this interpretation in the Tower of Babel story. Sometimes, civilizations need to be reset in order to keep humanity operating in a spiritually productive way.
One way of looking at history is that God engineered white civilization to rise in such a way that it would spread Christianity across the world. However, we have now gone too far, and God is suppressing us by flooding the planet with low IQ populations that cannot sustain our advanced societies.
In God's first move, Christianity needed to spread across the world and conquer other religions, and white Europeans were the agents of this spread. In his second move, the necessary level of supremacy that white Europeans were given in order to complete their global evangelization efforts needed to be dismantled in order to bring the world back to a stable equilibrium.
A similar strategy appears to have been used with the Roman Empire. The Church's identity became synonymous with the powerful high status empire in order to facilitate its spread. The fall of Rome led to the de-Romanization and further universalization of Christian theology. Before that, the Church was linked to the high status Jewish religion that the ancient world held in high esteem. The sack of Jerusalem in AD 70 led to the final de-Jewification of Christianity.
The last 500 years of upheaval have been an enormous geopolitical success story for the Church. Christianity went from being increasingly isolated in Europe to taking over the world, and it is now firmly embedded in the populations that are still growing.
There are less and less places on earth where the Christian God is not recognized as the one true God. Southeast Asia, for example, remains one of the few remaining strongholds of non-Abrahamic religion, but Christianity is making inroads there. Atheist countries like China have largely erased their native pagan religious beliefs, and Christianity is growing despite persecution. In some sense, Christianity has already taken over the world (especially if one sees Islam as a kind of Christian heresy), and its domination of the religious dimension will be further cemented by the demographic changes now occurring. As global IQ falls, and religion becomes increasingly important, Christianity is uniquely positioned to benefit from a renewed interest in faith.
God works in mysterious ways. For us Westerners, who have grown accustomed to comfortable living and constantly improving conditions, the near future is going to seem like a disaster. It will probably look and feel like civilizational decline or collapse. Under the surface, however, God appears to be manipulating the macro-trends towards his own objectives. Jesus' complete kingship over the nations has never been closer.