I agree that they are way too optimistic, I’m surprised Dawkins would be this naive.
The main trend is not so much a movement toward secularism (which would entail a shrinking of fundamentalist groups as well as liberal religious groups), but of liberal religious groups declining and losing members both to secularists and fundamentalist religious people. Also relevant is the fact that fundamentalists have high birthrates, while secularists have very low birthrates.
The main recruiting grounds for atheism are groups like mainstream Protestantism, liberal Catholicism and reform Judaism. These groups are themselves in decline due to a combination of factors: low birth rates, conversion toward more fiery religious groups, and conversion to secularism/atheism. Eventually this hunting ground will be depleted enough that seculars can no longer grow by recruiting them. They will have to raise their birthrates or start converting significant numbers of fundamentalist religious people to grow, and even to sustain their numbers.
Perhaps it’s different in the US, but here in the UK most of the ex-Christian atheists I know are ex-evangelicals.
Caveat 1: It should be said that what’s called evangelicalism in the UK is generally saner than what’s called evangelicalism in the US.
Caveat 2: I’m one of them, so there’s an obvious sampling bias.
I think maybe there are two different processes going on: gradual drift, where religious people become less seriously religious (and maybe eventually nonreligious) over the course of their lives, and more sudden conversion, where they explicitly think things through and decide to change their position. (“More sudden” can still mean “over a few years”.) The first mostly produces atheists out of casually religious people (because they’re less firmly committed to a particular position and can drift more easily) and out of liberally religious people (because the distance to atheism is less). The second mostly produces atheists out of seriously religious people (because they find it more important that their beliefs actually be true, and take more trouble to think about them) and out of conservatively religious people (because their positions are more drastically and obviously wrong). It may also be that there’s correlation between being seriously religious and being conservatively religious, e.g. because there’s little point in being not-seriously fundamentalist.
I agree with your observations and disagree with your conclusion.
Religious fundamentalism is strongly inversely correlated with size of the group. A small religious group will either fail to attract converts (you never hear of those, except if they’re Westboro) or grow. As it grows, it gradually reduces its degree of tension with the surrounding society to accommodate the growing range of interest of its more numerous members. It thereby becomes both more mainstream and more boring, which makes it harder to attract converts. So religious groups, after they attain enough size to become mainstream, grow mostly at their own rate of reproduction. If you doubt this, here’s a list of relevant literature.
Therefore, the mainstream religious movements of the next centuries, besides the shrinking ones we know, will be some of the ones that are now small, having grown to a size where they can’t maintain group cohesion on the oddities that make them distinct. One church that has been making this transition in recent years is the New Apostolic Church. I expect the Jehovah’s Witnesses to go the same way soon—they’ve been de-emphasizing their most characteristic quirks for a while, while maintaining steady growth by telling female adherents to be fruitful and avoid higher education.
There’s also the inverse relationship too—as religious groups lose members, they tend to get more extreme beliefs as a group as the more mainstream members leave earlier.
I agree that they are way too optimistic, I’m surprised Dawkins would be this naive.
The main trend is not so much a movement toward secularism (which would entail a shrinking of fundamentalist groups as well as liberal religious groups), but of liberal religious groups declining and losing members both to secularists and fundamentalist religious people. Also relevant is the fact that fundamentalists have high birthrates, while secularists have very low birthrates.
The main recruiting grounds for atheism are groups like mainstream Protestantism, liberal Catholicism and reform Judaism. These groups are themselves in decline due to a combination of factors: low birth rates, conversion toward more fiery religious groups, and conversion to secularism/atheism. Eventually this hunting ground will be depleted enough that seculars can no longer grow by recruiting them. They will have to raise their birthrates or start converting significant numbers of fundamentalist religious people to grow, and even to sustain their numbers.
Perhaps it’s different in the US, but here in the UK most of the ex-Christian atheists I know are ex-evangelicals.
Caveat 1: It should be said that what’s called evangelicalism in the UK is generally saner than what’s called evangelicalism in the US.
Caveat 2: I’m one of them, so there’s an obvious sampling bias.
I think maybe there are two different processes going on: gradual drift, where religious people become less seriously religious (and maybe eventually nonreligious) over the course of their lives, and more sudden conversion, where they explicitly think things through and decide to change their position. (“More sudden” can still mean “over a few years”.) The first mostly produces atheists out of casually religious people (because they’re less firmly committed to a particular position and can drift more easily) and out of liberally religious people (because the distance to atheism is less). The second mostly produces atheists out of seriously religious people (because they find it more important that their beliefs actually be true, and take more trouble to think about them) and out of conservatively religious people (because their positions are more drastically and obviously wrong). It may also be that there’s correlation between being seriously religious and being conservatively religious, e.g. because there’s little point in being not-seriously fundamentalist.
I agree with your observations and disagree with your conclusion.
Religious fundamentalism is strongly inversely correlated with size of the group. A small religious group will either fail to attract converts (you never hear of those, except if they’re Westboro) or grow. As it grows, it gradually reduces its degree of tension with the surrounding society to accommodate the growing range of interest of its more numerous members. It thereby becomes both more mainstream and more boring, which makes it harder to attract converts. So religious groups, after they attain enough size to become mainstream, grow mostly at their own rate of reproduction. If you doubt this, here’s a list of relevant literature.
Therefore, the mainstream religious movements of the next centuries, besides the shrinking ones we know, will be some of the ones that are now small, having grown to a size where they can’t maintain group cohesion on the oddities that make them distinct. One church that has been making this transition in recent years is the New Apostolic Church. I expect the Jehovah’s Witnesses to go the same way soon—they’ve been de-emphasizing their most characteristic quirks for a while, while maintaining steady growth by telling female adherents to be fruitful and avoid higher education.
There’s also the inverse relationship too—as religious groups lose members, they tend to get more extreme beliefs as a group as the more mainstream members leave earlier.