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Is There a Global Resurgence of Religion?

"One of the things that happens in post-industrial society is a dramatic decline in fertility rates. This is strongly linked with religiosity. We find, the many things linked with this dimension of the question of whether religion is important or it’s not important are at the religion-is-important end of the scale. Emphasis is on having many children and on traditional family roles. And secularization has a joker in it. It tends to bring, in the long run, dramatically declining fertility rates. That is the reason that empirically, although virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward secular orientations, it is also true that the world as a whole has more people with traditional religious beliefs than ever before. The biggest single reason is that secularization leads to cultural changes that bring a huge decrease in fertility rates, from five or six children per woman to, in the average advanced industrial society, 1.6; and in some countries, Spain and Italy, for example, the rate is 1.2 children.
This is way below replacement level and it is why the societies that emphasize traditional religious values are becoming a bigger share of the world’s population. So religion shows no sign whatever of declining. Though secularization has a genuine logic to it and has been at work, it is its own gravedigger in the long run. Things may change; I will not attempt to predict the future, but there has been a huge differential on fertility rates, so that modernization has not had the effect of shoving religion off the map. In fact, religion is alive and flourishing, and by calculations that are pretty straightforward, the percentage of the world’s population that has traditional religious beliefs is a larger share of the world’s population today than 20 years ago."
-- Ronald Inglehart

[pewresearch.org]

skado 9 Feb 17
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1

"This is strongly linked with religiosity.."
Is the link causal? What comes first: secularization or declining fertility rates?
And what is the cause and what the effect?
Or are both sides effects of some hidden third cause in the background? Maybe they are both aspects of some big modernization process which itself has many strands and causes.

Great questions all, and I would love to know how Mr. Inglehart would have answered them. My personal guess is when he says “linked with religiosity” I doubt he is suggesting a simple, direct causal relationship, but more as you suggest, two aspects of the process of modernization which probably feed and interact with each other in very complex ways.

1

The following link is one explanation of the decline in fertility rates, however, it does not include the wide range of environmental factors. [volusonclub.net]

0

So it is nice to know that R. Inglehart favours the things which drive high birth rates, and religion, like poverty, low womens rights and poor education, and that he thinks overpopulation is a benefit. Me thinks, that his misogyny and racism are showing a bit.

Please help me understand why you think he favors those things. Thanks.

@skado See ASTRALMAX's link above. It is far more complex than that, correlation does not equate to causation. Poverty and/or lack of wealth and education, are more likely to drive both high religiosity and high birth rates as the main factors. Though it is not even that simple, because religion may also cause poverty and resistance to education, while poor women's rights are also known to cause poverty, so that there is probably a whole complex of feed back loops.

As to why I think that R. I. may be motivated by closet misogyny and racism, that is just a guess, which could be wrong, but when you encounter gross oversimplification it is a reasonable assumption that you are also encountering hidden bias. While usually, only closet racists tend to care about, the future genetic makeup of the human species as it will be long after they are dead. Most people just say. "So what. It may be a moral duty to hand on the best world we can to the future, but who they are, and what they do, is not our concern. "

@Fernapple
…except maybe when one is a political scientist and one’s job is being the director of the World Values Survey??

@skado Perhaps who knows. We are all infected with cultural racism to some degree. Here is a short summing of the World Values Survey findings, are not concerned with those issues at all. It is perhaps not wise to cherry pick statements by individuals out of context.

"Much of the variation in human values between societies boils down to two broad dimensions: a first dimension of “traditional vs. secular-rational values” and a second dimension of “survival vs. self-expression values.”[9]
On the first dimension, traditional values emphasize religiosity, national pride, respect for authority, obedience and marriage. Secular-rational values emphasize the opposite on each of these accounts.[9]
On the second dimension, survival values involve a priority of security over liberty, non-acceptance of homosexuality, abstinence from political action, distrust in outsiders and a weak sense of happiness. Self-expression values imply the opposite on all these accounts.[9]
Following the 'revised theory of modernization,' values change in predictable ways with certain aspects of modernity. People's priorities shift from traditional to secular-rational values as their sense of existential security increases (or backwards from secular-rational values to traditional values as their sense of existential security decreases).[9]
The largest increase in existential security occurs with the transition from agrarian to industrial societies. Consequently, the largest shift from traditional towards secular-rational values happens in this phase.[9]
People's priorities shift from survival to self-expression values as their sense of individual agency increases (or backwards from self-expression values to survival as the sense of individual agency decreases).[9]
The largest increase in individual agency occurs with the transition from industrial to knowledge societies. Consequently, the largest shift from survival to self-expression values happens in this phase.[9]
The value differences between societies around the world show a pronounced culture zone pattern. The strongest emphasis on traditional values and survival values is found in the Islamic societies of the Middle East. By contrast, the strongest emphasis on secular-rational values and self-expression values is found in the Protestant societies of Northern Europe.[10]
These culture zone differences reflect different historical pathways of how entire groups of societies entered modernity. These pathways account for people's different senses of existential security and individual agency, which in turn account for their different emphases on secular-rational values and self-expression values.[10]
Values also differ within societies along such cleavage lines as gender, generation, ethnicity, religious denomination, education, income and so forth.[11]
Generally speaking, groups whose living conditions provide people with a stronger sense of existential security and individual agency nurture a stronger emphasis on secular-rational values and self-expression values.[11]
However, the within-societal differences in people's values are dwarfed by a factor five to ten by the between-societal differences. On a global scale, basic living conditions differ still much more between than within societies, and so do the experiences of existential security and individual agency that shape people's values.[11]
A specific subset of self-expression values—emancipative values—combines an emphasis on freedom of choice and equality of opportunities. Emancipative values, thus, involve priorities for lifestyle liberty, gender equality, personal autonomy and the voice of the people.[12]
Emancipative values constitute the key cultural component of a broader process of human empowerment. Once set in motion, this process empowers people to exercise freedoms in their course of actions.[13]
If set in motion, human empowerment advances on three levels. On the socio-economic level, human empowerment advances as growing action resources increase people's capabilities to exercise freedoms. On the socio-cultural level, human empowerment advances as rising emancipative values increase people's aspirations to exercise freedoms. On the legal-institutional level, human empowerment advances as widened democratic rights increase people's entitlements to exercise freedoms.[10]
Human empowerment is an entity of empowering capabilities, aspirations, and entitlements. As an entity, human empowerment tends to advance in virtuous spirals or to recede in vicious spirals on each of its three levels.[14]
As the cultural component of human empowerment, emancipative values are highly consequential in manifold ways. For one, emancipative values establish a civic form of modern individualism that favours out-group trust and cosmopolitan orientations towards others.[15]
Emancipative values encourage nonviolent protest, even against the risk of repression. Thus, emancipative values provide social capital that activates societies, makes publics more self-expressive, and vitalizes civil society. Emancipative values advance entire societies' civic agency.[16]
If emancipative values grow strong in countries that are democratic, they help to prevent movements away from democracy.[17]
If emancipative values grow strong in countries that are undemocratic, they help to trigger movements towards democracy.[17]
Emancipative values exert these effects because they encourage mass actions that put power holders under pressures to sustain, substantiate or establish democracy, depending on what the current challenge for democracy is.[17]
Objective factors that have been found to favour democracy (including economic prosperity, income equality, ethnic homogeneity, world market integration, global media exposure, closeness to democratic neighbours, a Protestant heritage, social capital and so forth) exert an influence on democracy mostly insofar as these factors favour emancipative values.[17]
Emancipative values do not strengthen people's desire for democracy, for the desire for democracy is universal at this point in history. But emancipative values do change the nature of the desire for democracy. And they do so in a double way.[18]
For one, emancipative values make people's understanding of democracy more liberal: people with stronger emancipative values emphasize the empowering features of democracy rather than bread-and-butter and law-and-order issues.[18]
Next, emancipative values make people assess the level of their country's democracy more critically: people with stronger emancipative values rather underrate than overrate their country's democratic performance.[18][failed verification]
Together, then, emancipative values generate a critical-liberal desire for democracy. The critical-liberal desire for democracy is a formidable force of democratic reforms. And, it is the best available predictor of a country's effective level of democracy and of other indicators of good governance. Neither democratic traditions nor cognitive mobilization account for the strong positive impact of emancipative values on the critical-liberal desire for democracy.[18]
Emancipative values constitute the single most important factor in advancing the empowerment of women. Economic, religious, and institutional factors that have been found to advance women's empowerment, do so for the most part because they nurture emancipative values.[12]
Emancipative values change people's life strategy from an emphasis on securing a decent subsistence level to enhancing human agency. As the shift from subsistence to agency affects entire societies, the overall level of subjective well-being rises.[13]
The emancipative consequences of the human empowerment process are not a culture-specific peculiarity of the 'West.' The same empowerment processes that advance emancipative values and a critical-liberal desire for democracy in the 'West,' do the same in the 'East' and in other culture zones.[19]
The social dominance of Islam and individual identification as Muslim both weaken emancipative values. But among young Muslims with high education, and especially among young Muslim women with high education, the Muslim/Non-Muslim gap over emancipative values closes."

@Fernapple
Thanks. My sentiments exactly. That's why I supply the links for context.

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