The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [94]
There is irony to how the religious pecking order changed in the United States. In the 1960s, the message from secular society to religion seemed to be “modernize.” The choice was between opening up to the secular world, adapting to the discoveries of science, or fading into irrelevance. Around the world, the Catholic Church tried just that and it didn’t work. The churches that did well were those that took the opposite path. The orders that thrived were the fundamentalists, who preached the literal interpretation of the Bible, and the Pentecostal denominations that engaged in exorcisms and other cathartic rituals—those who stepped back and recovered the traditional proposition of faith as a wall to enclose a community by demanding a very high price for membership.
WILL GOD BOUNCE BACK?
It’s a compelling thesis. A few years ago, I wrote an article about evangelical Protestants trying to expand among Hispanics in the United States, peeling believers from the Catholic Church. I accompanied a group of Southern Baptists on an evangelizing mission in a supermarket in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Ontario, California. Their zeal and purpose was a sight to see. About a dozen people deployed across the supermarket parking lot, reassuring harried shoppers about the benefits of the Christian life. When the woman pushing her overstuffed cart to her car stopped to glance at the leaflet pressed into her hand, a flock of evangelizers descended upon her like a flock of geese. They never tired. In the course of a week’s reporting, I was invited to come to God a good half-dozen times. Contrasted against the tedious, soporific masses I experienced growing up in Mexico, the Baptists offered the energy of a rock concert. And they offered specific promises about how faith would improve people’s wayward lives.
There are other potential explanations of the unique strength of Americans’ attachment to God, though. I suspect it has to do with the fact that, for a rich country, the United States has lots of poor people. Sociologists suggest that demand for religious services as insurance against potential hazards declines as countries climb the ladder of development.
Development makes people more secure. It provides income, better health services, and education. It reduces the risk of political prosecution and ethnic strife. But it doesn’t do this across the board. There are large pockets of misery even in highly developed countries. In these impoverished corners religious belief will thrive, offering a shot at security and ultimate happiness. Here God can play His role as the ultimate form of insurance. In the United States—which suffers the most acute income inequality in the developed world—these pockets abound.
Seen this way, it becomes obvious why religion is growing in some parts of the world even as secularization advances in others: in poor religious countries, people have more babies than in rich, secular states. Across the world, development has reduced fertility rates. Families in rich countries have chosen to have fewer children and invest more resources in each of them. The fervent poor, by contrast, have hung on to traditions that frown on contraception and mandate big families.
The ultra-Orthodox in Israel earn less than half what non-Orthodox families do. In the mid-1990s, their fertility rate was 7.6 children per woman. By contrast, the fertility rate of other Jews in Israel is about 2.3. In the United States, the most religious states tend to be the most fertile and the poorest. New Hampshire is probably the least God-fearing state in the Union: 21.4 percent of its population report being atheist or having no religious belief. It is relatively rich, with a median income per capita of $74,625 in 2007. And it had only forty-two births per one thousand women in 2006. In Mississippi, by contrast, there were sixty-two births per thousand. Mississippi is poor: