Which first, atheist or childless home?

Nimitz · Guest Local time: 3:17 PM

www.canada.com EH?

What came first -- the atheist or the childless home?
Gerald Owen, National Post
Published: Friday, July 06, 2007

A chicken-and-egg conundrum is peculiarly appropriate to a question involving fertility. Which came first, the waning of religion in the West or the fall in birth rates?

In the June-July issue of the U.S. magazine Policy Review, Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt, who is best known as the author of a 2005 book called Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs and Other Parent Substitutes, has come out with an article called "How the West Really Lost God."

Ms. Eberstadt is more cautious in her text than in her title, but she advances the engaging and arresting hypothesis that the decline in fertility is the cause of secularization-- rather than, as often is casually assumed, vice versa.

Certainly, religious couples are apt to have more children than non-believers. No doubt, many people attribute this to the backwardness of believers. Though it's not always clear exactly whom Ms. Eberstadt is disagreeing with, she is in any case right that there is a widespread assumption that loss of the faith is the natural result of enlightenment and progress.

Her article is in part a reply to the wave of books by militant and articulate atheists, especially Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. It is hard to tell whether this crusade is an expression of rage that religion has failed to die or is a final push for atheist victory, deploying recent discoveries in genetics as if these were as decisive a weapon as the nuclear bomb was in August, 1945. But Ms. Eberstadt seems confident that atheism will not prevail.

Though she is evidently friendly to religion, she attributes less causative power to it than those she opposes. Rather than praising religion for encouraging fertility, she argues that the experience of becoming parents opens up human beings to a richer consciousness of what is beyond themselves, and thus to religious belief.

She is eloquent on this, though one of her literary references contains a howling error: Medea did not unwittingly eat her children in a pie; that was a man called Thyestes, whose brother made the evil pie. Rather, Medea killed her children in full consciousness, when Jason, her husband, married a new wife.

The conclusion Ms. Eberstadt heads toward is that secularization is not inevitable or irreversible, because people will start to lose their taste for childlessness when they see the bereftness of old Baby Boomers in nursing homes. So, with more children, religion will revive.

She may well be right, but there seems to be no reason to suppose that children will once again amount to a solid pension plan, rather than a heavy expense. For that, the belief in long-drawn-out education remains too strong.

The evidence for Ms. Eberstadt's hypothesis is tentative, but she makes out a good prima facie case. One hopes that a quantitative social scientist will pursue it. Though she gives "thanks to demographer Nicholas Eberstadt" -- her husband -- "for illuminating some of the points in this section of the essay," he should be a prime candidate. I expect that historical data on religious practice and participation in organized religion are much less available than the data on birth rates, but a survey of several countries would make possible some conclusions, one way or the other.

As it stands, Ms. Eberstadt considers France, Britain and Ireland, arguing that the decline of birth rates had set in "for some time before secularization as we know it -- loss of religious faith and of such habits as churchgoing."

The sudden modernization of Ireland in the past 35 years or so helps her case considerably, because there are indeed comparative figures on weekly Mass-going, but the brevity of the time-period makes me wonder about what to infer about causation.

"Essentially," Ms. Eberstadt writes, "the Irish stopped having babies and families -- and shortly afterward stopped going to church."

Maybe "at more or less the same time" would be more accurate. If the phenomena are simultaneous, they may share a cause rather than one being the cause of the other.

In the end, the chicken and the egg cause each other, and the real question is what causes life and reproduction in the first place. Similarly, secularism and depopulation are both parts of one package deal, and the persisting riddle remains, Why did modernity cross the road?

gowen@nationalpost.com

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So if your parents didn't have kids you'll grow up to be an atheist!
umm
Maybe I should read the story again... Wink

tonyman1989 · Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2007 7:15 pm Post subject:

What the propblem with lower birth rates?

there to many people in the world already.
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Mr_C · Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2007 9:07 pm Post subject:

caseagainstfaith · Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2007 9:10 pm Post subject:

anamoly · Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2007 9:25 pm Post subject:

I wanna be the first to say...

OMG We all need to fuck !! Let's get it on!!!

sorry...
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LOLatChristians · Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2007 10:14 pm Post subject:

I want to say "correlation is not causation" but I feel it'd be cliche.

tonyman1989 · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 1:14 am Post subject:

josephpalazzo · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 7:27 am Post subject:

Low birthrate has more to do with urbanization, higher education and women wanting to have careers. Also, high unemployment for people under 30, high housing costs can also play a role.

read this,
read more,
read more.

ShaSha · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 9:25 am Post subject:

As a woman, a mother and a theist, I had all of my children because I wanted a large family. My religion at the time did play a part in the spacing but not the numbers.

I believe that the numbers of children have gone down because of choice given by both good contraceptives and parents wanting a good material life for themselves and for their children.

rock · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 9:44 am Post subject:

Contraceptives and the cost of having a kid are, imo, the real big factors.

Maybe one explanation would be.
Smaller families means more likely hood of betterment in education and more importantly a more affluent life style. Thus the rise of more non-religious types.
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Sultan Borat · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 10:10 am Post subject:

Sultan Borat · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 10:19 am Post subject:

Moloth · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 11:25 am Post subject:

and so, the prophecy in the form of the movie "Idiocracy" begins to unfold...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
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Last edited by Moloth on Tue Feb 30, 2026 13:61 am; edited 426 times in total

Castaa · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 2:34 pm Post subject:

Philosophos · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 2:36 pm Post subject:

I'm pretty sure that I do not want any children.

The party celebrating this fact will be held at Moloth's house in one month. Wink

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