Eric Kaufmann

Much of Eric Kaufmann's research concerns the growth of religion around the world. Factors that determine how many children a woman has in her life time—that is, her completed or total fertility rate—include her educational attainment, her income, and how religious she is. For example, in the cities of the Middle East, women who supported Sharia law had a 50% fertility advantage over those who opposed it the most at the turn of the century.[7] According to the World Religious Database, the proportion of the human population identifying with a religion increased from 81% in 1970 to 85% in 2000 and is predicted to rise to 87% in 2025. In addition, the Catholic Church has gained 12% additional followers between 2000 and 2010, mainly from Asia and Africa.[7] In 2018, Muslims had a median age of 23, Hindus 26, Christians 30, Buddhists and the religiously unaffiliated 34, and Jews 36. For comparison, the median age of the global population was 28 in 2018. Overall, Christians have a fertility rate of 2.6, and Muslims 2.9. Islam is the world's fastest growing religion.[8] Meanwhile, the expansion of secularism will slow in Europe as the twenty-first century progresses.[7]

For Kaufmann, religion can grow even in otherwise secular societies.[7] For example, in Israel, the ultra-Orthodox Jews comprised just about five percent of the nation's primary schoolchildren in 1960, but by the start of the twenty-first century, one third of Jewish first graders in Israel came from this religious sect.[9] Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel had on average 7.5 children compared to their more mainstream counterparts with just over two in the early 2000s.[7] In Europe, immigration from the Middle East and Africa is an engine of religious growth. Children of immigrants tend to be about as religious as their parents and consider their religion to be a marker of their ethnic identity, thereby insulating themselves from the secularizing forces of the host society. The other engine is comparatively high fertility and religious endogamy. In France, a white Catholic woman had half a child more than her secular counterparts in the early 2000s; in Spain, that number was 0.77.[7] In the Netherlands, the youngest villages belong to Orthodox Calvinists,[7] who comprised 7% of the Dutch population by the early 2000s.[9] In Austria, the number of people below the age of 15 who were Muslims rose past the 10%-mark in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the United Kingdom, over 90% of Muslims married other Muslims by the turn of the millennium, and it is well-known that children born into an interfaith marriage tend to be less religious than their parents. Interfaith marriage is in fact a vehicle of secularization.[7] Ultra-Orthodox Jews comprised just 12% of the British Jewish population but three quarters of Jewish births at the start of the twenty-first century. Kaufmann projected that this group would make up the majority of Anglo-American Jews by 2050.[9] Similarly, he predicted that Catholicism will become the largest religion in the United States by 2040 despite considerable losses to secularization and conversion to Protestantism thanks in no small part to the fact that Latino Catholics had a fertility rate of 2.83 compared to the national average of 2.03 in 2003. He argued that such religious demographic changes will bring about social and political ramifications later in the century.[7]

• Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. Profile, 2010. ISBN 978-1846681448

In this 2010 book, Kaufmann argued that the answer to the question raised in the title is in the affirmative because demographic realities pose real challenges to the assumption of the inevitability of secular and liberal progress. He observed that devout factions tend to have a significant fertility advantage over their more moderate counterparts and the non-religious. For instance, white Catholic women in France have on average half a child more than their white secular counterparts while the Amish in the United States have three to four times more children than their fellow Christians on average. Highly religious groups tend to isolate themselves from the secularizing effects of modern mainstream Western society, making it more likely that the children will retain their parents' faiths. At the same time, secular people generally have rather low fertility rates by comparison for a variety of reasons, such as materialism, individualism, the preference for the here and now, feminism, environmentalism, or general pessimism. Kaufmann projected that secularism will have a mixed future in Europe. It will remain strong in most Catholic countries, notably Ireland and Spain, but has essentially ground to a halt in Protestant Europe and in France, and will falter in Northwestern Europe by mid-century. He told Mercator Net that the only way to buckle the trend involves "a creed that touches the emotional registers can lure away the children of fundamentalists" and "a repudiation of multiculturalism." He suggested that "secular nationalism" and moderate religion associated with the nation-state could be part of the mix, but these traditions have been losing support at a considerable rate.[10]

• Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities. Harry N. Abrams, 2018. ISBN 978-1468316971

Eric Kaufmann's Whiteshift is an extensive study of how the migration-driven demographic transformation of the West affects the ballot box.[11] The title of the 2018 book encodes Kaufmann's predictions that, as a result of international migration, Western countries will become ever more ethnically diverse and a growing number of people will be of mixed heritage. He further argues that the category of 'white people' will be enlarged to include more ethnically diverse individuals. For Kaufmann, one of the major schisms in the political landscape of the West at the time of writing is due to factions that want to speed up this process and those who want to slow it down. He suggested that the surge of nationalism and populism observed in many Western countries is due to the latter group. For decades, the norms of acceptable political demands had been established by the media, institutions of higher education, and mainstream political groups. Such norms include what he called "left modernism," a more precise term for what is commonly referred to as political correctness, and "asymmetrical multiculturalism," or the idea that all cultures present in a given society deserve to be preserved except the host culture. These norms have prevented mainstream politicians and political parties from responding to the concerns of large swathes of the voting population, giving nationalist populists an opportunity to rise to the front.[12]

• The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: The Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2004. ISBN 978-0674013032
• The Orange Order: A Contemporary Northern Irish History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. ISBN 978-0199208487
• Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland Since 1945: The Decline of the Loyal Family with Henry Patterson. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007. ISBN 978-0719074967

• Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities. Routledge, 2004. ISBN 978-0415315425
• Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping International Security and National Politics with Jack Goldstone and Monica Duffy Toft. Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0199949229
• Whither the Child: Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility with W. Bradford Wilcox. Paradigm, 2012. ISBN 978-1612050935
• Nationalism and Conflict Management with Robert Schertzer and Eric Taylor Woods. Routledge, 2012. ISBN 978-0415520454