As theology, ideology, and political party line up, switching becomes less important and the religious and political market is driven more by population shifts. This is not only true in the United States, but in a growing number of societies around the world.
All of which explains why pundits' interest in demography has been steadily rising. Ruy Teixeira, for instance, claims that the growth of the college-educated, secular and Hispanic proportion of the population will soon provide the Democrats with an inbuilt electoral majority. Chris Bowers of the Nation styles this the "End of Bubba Dominance." On the other side of the ledger, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks highlights the role of fertility: "Liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result." "In Seattle," adds Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, "there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs."...
...The results, published in the journal Population Studies, show that Democrats are only marginally younger than Republicans and Republican women bear the same number of children as their Democratic sisters. Immigration, however, is an important factor. If ethnic party identification remains as it is, Latino population growth will benefit the Democrats, shifting the balance between the two parties by two and a half points in the Democrats' favor over the next 30 years.
However, Republican fertility is not a dead letter: the GOP has a lead over the Democrats among white women and among younger women at all levels of income and education. If the childbearing gap among women aged 20-40 continues to widen, this will certainly benefit the GOP. But even if Republican women enjoyed a 30 percent fertility advantage for a century, this would only halve the gains accruing to the Democrats from immigration. Were immigration to be cut in half, however, the GOP would quickly begin to close in on the Democrats beyond 2040...
...Contraception has severed the link between sex and procreation, placing fertility under our control as never before. Family size, which was once a matter of survival, is now a value choice. Seculars can delay having children and opt for fewer, while the religious—especially fundamentalists—have them earlier and more often. This is sometimes called the "second demographic transition" and is of signal importance because in the United States and elsewhere, ours is an epoch of religious polarization. The challenge of secularism, and its threat to religion in the form of modernist theology, has prompted a fundamentalist backlash across all the major world religions...
...The future has already arrived in major immigration gateway cities in "secular" Europe. Consider London. In the past 20 years, according to religious censuses, Christian attendance has nosedived 40 percent in England but has remained steady in the capital. This is not because the swingers of Soho have sobered up. Peer inside a typical London church and you'll find that more than 60 percent of the parishioners are non-white and many others are East European immigrants. At the same time, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and other religious groups are growing. The net effect is a more religious London than a quarter century ago. In Paris and other European entrepôts, the same has occurred. England in 2050 is expected to look like London, so it's easy to imagine a more religious England, and Europe, at the end of our century.
The same is true in the United States. "Nones" may be the third-largest religious group in the United States, and ex-Catholics the fourth-largest, but the switching story needs a demographic context. If America remained 70 percent white, the population would reach European levels of secularization in two generations and Catholics would rapidly lose market share to Protestants. Instead, swift Hispanic and Asian population growth is projected to stabilize the share of nonreligious Americans at roughly today's levels. Catholics, far from declining, may outnumber Protestants among the nation's youth as early as the 2040s.
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