Must Read:  Breeding for God (Eric Kaufmann)

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

The article, “Breeding for God,” by Eric Kaufmann has many interesting points that counterbalance each other.  One of the most interesting was his emphasis on the difference between church attendance and church affiliation and between this and generic religiosity, which cannot be as easily measured as mere church attendance but may be several times more important. 

  One caveat I would suggest concerns Kaufmann’s conclusion that these differentials do not operate among Muslims.  Probably religious identification is much closer to religiosity, but mosque attendance at least in America is probably not much more than ten percent of the Muslim population.  This poor mosque attendance, of course, may be hyped by organizational Muslims to show that 3 rather than 1 percent of Americans are Muslims.  The old world map where countries with 2% or more of Muslims are pink and those with less are white already must be reissued to show that most of the formerly white world has already become “pinkified.”

  The most significant conclusion that might come from this article is that the high proportion of generically religious (not the author’s term but mine) could result in an even more rapid growth of the Muslim population than we already are experiencing, even without the demographic multiplier effect that the author so emphasizes.

  We have yet to analyze the remarkable phenomenon whereby accelerating conversion to Islam seems to correlate with rising demonization of it.  This is counter-intuitive and may be a phenomenon peculiar to America, where the underdog traditionally has been preferred to the overdog simply because Americans from abroad (with the exception of Muslims in recent decades) almost all came from the marginalized in their own societies.  As “whites” gradually decline to the role of a minority in America, we may hear the cry from the newer immigrants: “Underdogs of the world unite; the sun is rising in the West!”