Conservatives Will Inherit the Earth

Demographer Says Religious, Cultural Conservatives on the Rise

By Mark Adams

"Conservatives will inherit the earth" according to the cover story of the current edition of Foreign Policy magazine which argues that families that adhere to traditional morality are likely to make up a significant portion of future generations because they are producing more children.

In the "Return of Patriarchy," Phillip Longman argues that the "great difference in fertility rates between secular individualists and religious or cultural conservatives augurs a vast, demographically driven change in modern societies." Looking at polling data from Europe, Longman, a senior fellow at the left-of-center New America Foundation, notes that "how many children different people have, and under what circumstances, correlates strongly with their beliefs on a wide range of political and cultural attitudes." Those Europeans who "distrust the army," accept "soft drugs, homosexuality, and euthanasia," and "seldom, if ever, attend church . . . are far more likely to live alone, or in childless, cohabitating unions, than those" who hold opposite opinions.

Some may argue that the children of parents who believe in traditional morality can reject that morality just as the children of 1960s largely rejected the pervasive social norms of the day. Longman says there is a key difference. " . . . during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of modern societies married and had children. . . . disparity in family size between the religious and the secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society."

Longman's article is particularly concerned with explaining why patriarchal families have historically been necessary for the survival of society. "No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it," Longman writes. What marks patriarchal societies, according to Longman, are "customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation. Of these, among the most important is the stigmatization of 'illegitimate' children. One measure of the degree to which patriarchy has diminished in advanced societies is the growing acceptance of out-of-wedlock births, which have now become the norm in Scandinavian countries, for example."

But Longman takes pains to make it clear that patriarchy does not mean misogyny nor should it be associated with "Taliban rebels or Muslim fanatics in Nigeria stoning an adulteress" which he describes as "examples of insecure societies that have degenerated into male tyrannies" that do not "represent the form of patriarchy that has achieved evolutionary advantage in human history."

Copyright 2005 - C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute).Permission granted for unlimited use. Credit required.

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