Posted on 09/04/2006 4:35:25 PM PDT by inductivist.blogspot.com
I wanted to quantify the pattern of religious people having more children than the irreligious. Starting with the U.S, the General Social Survey (2004) indicates that Americans who never go to church average 1.67 kids: it's 2.25 for those who go weekly and a slightly lower 2.14 for those who go more often. By the way, the fertile "attends weekly" group is not fringe: it is the modal category of religious behavior in America.
As for the world, I looked at the World Values Survey and calculated that those who never attend religious services have 1.72 children, compared to 2.47 for those going more than once a week. (I suspect that this sample is a bit skewed toward more developed countries).
I'm reminded of William James' statement that (went something like) believers will always have more vitality than non-believers.
Whether this is good new or bad depends on what the definition of "church" is.
Have you any statistics correlating these figures to education or affluence? By themselves as presented they don't appear to have much significance and are too isolated from other data to draw meaningful conclusions.
What influence do you think education or income have on the correlation between fertility and church attendance? These data are very meaningful: for one thing, they suggest that religious people outbreed the irreligious, and this is a force which, over time, will push the world in a religious direction.
He asks because it's a well documented fact that those with less education/income have more children.
I understand that but can you cite some educational or economic factors that correlate to the number of children? I would imagine you are right in saying this is pertains mostly to the West.
Certainly the Islamists would tilt the statistics strongly in that direction; however, even in Europe this religious body is outproducing the indigenous population.
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