A new study
argues that religion is headed for extinction in nine countries, including
Ireland , if present trends continue.

That’s a
very big ‘if’, of course. I suppose if religious affiliation continues to drop
by one or two percent a year into the future eventually you get down to zero.

However, if
religion eventually becomes extinct here (not that I’ll be around to witness
it), I’d be amazed. It is extremely hard to believe that the number of religious
believers in Ireland will shrink so low as to be virtually un-measurable.

Eric
Kaufmann, author of ‘Will the religious inherit the Earth?’ posits that in the
countries like Sweden or France, the percentage of people who are religiously affiliated
seems to have bottomed out at around 5-10 percent and has not gone any lower in
many years. In other words, there seems to be an irreducible core. It remains
to be seen what Ireland’s irreducible core turns out to be. I suspect around 15
percent.

Kaufmann,
who is himself secular, but not aggressively so (The Iona Institute hosted him
last year), also argues that three factors indicate that if anything religion
in the West will bounce back over the next century.

The first
is immigration from more religious regions, even allowing for many of these
immigrants giving up their religion.

The second
is the fact that religious people have more children than non-religious people.

The third
is that religious parents are becoming better at protecting their children
against the ‘lure’ of secular societies.

Putting
these three factors together doesn’t add up to a  new religious take-over of Western societies,
– far from it- but they certainly mean those predictions that religion will
become all but extinct in many countries are very far from the mark.

What is
also left out is the possibility of religious revival. There was a big religious
revival in countries like Britain in the 19^th century and there is
no particular reason why such a thing won’t happen again.