I never knew whether this figured with Karl Rove’s calculations, but I gathered it did obliquely — tucked away into which areas of the nation are growing fastest and which are growing slowest.  But it gathered quite a bit of credence.  It was one of New York Times Magazine’s Year of Ideas “Ideas”.

See, religious people breed more than secular people do.  And the correlation of societal attitudes and politics correlates amazingly well from one generation to the next.  Hence, the future lies with the Party of God.  The Republicans are simply breeding faster than the Democrats, because they take stock in the phrase “Be Fruitful and Multiply”.
I knew intuitively from the start this was bunk, insofar as it goes to political futures, but I could never and still can’t explain where the problem lies.  Surely it’s true in some degree that parents pass values on to the next generation, and surely the most religious hew more to this rule than the secular would.  I present for your consideration The Amish as an extreme example: deeply religious, the kids have an opportunity to leave that life behind, and they do not.  But that may be the point: there’s is exponentially a tighter and more constrained society than ours.

As for our democratic society, there was a couple of months ago a conference of evangelical preachers sending out the warning siresns that our children are fading away from the Church.  I made a note of that because it conflicted with this Republican Baby Boom and Democratic Baby Dearth concept.  In the end, it came across as a warning hype to feed the coffers: we need money to stop this… why, in 30 years the US will be as Secular as those godless Europeans, and we don’t want that, so please send us your contributions!

But the contradictions work everywhere, even onto the personal level.  Start with the “Generation Gap”, and go onto self-conflict.  Something about the old maxim that “If you’re conservative when you’re young you have no heart, and if you’re liberal when you’re old you have no head.”  And you suddenly become a conservative when you start paying those taxes, or a conservative is a liberal who has been young.  It is a sign that liberals haven’t gotten ahold of the narrative that the counter to these semi-bumper sticker maxims don’t have as much popular currency — a liberal is a conservative who has a medical emergency and no health insurance.

This is simply by way of asking: are we really such static characters that this idea of “religious birthing” has any reality to it?  There is no dynamism in us as people and us as a society that society cannot help but change?

And hence goes another nail in the coffin of a supposed “Permanent Republican Majority”.

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