Updated 2 years ago
This is a problem for the US down the road for this simple question:
Without the religious, who’s going to have the babies?
America is secularizing more, and faster, than other countries.
Why? Many reasons, including the end of the Cold War (America fought it, Europe not so much, so they secularized 40 years earlier), but I’d say mostly the Internet.
Kids were no longer sequestered in the mores of their rural communities. They could find other gays or trans kids in faraway places, or kids that liked weird things.
The same decentralized community building that brought us fringe groups like Furries, Bronies, Antifa, QAnon, and even MAGA has also much more broadly proliferated atheism. Although ISIS got some converts, that was more about its fringe status than spirituality. Religion spreads more face to face, within a community, and the dialectic nature of the Internet transmitted to isolated individuals absolutely destroys faith in institutions.
If I were a religious zealot, I’d point out a correlation with pornography. But that is just a subset of the Internet.
A lot of this makes me a bit sad, because for all its faults and abuses, religion has consistently offered community throughout history – a glue that holds everything together. You may of course be the smart hipster who marches to your own drummer, but you cannot deny religion almost uniquely elevates birthrates, and this matters a lot. Maybe not today, not 5 or 10 years from now, but many countires around the world are going to evaporate this century due to aging:
Someone has to have the babies!
And one only has to look at China and Russia to see where atheism takes you. En masse.
It takes you to a manmade hell.
