Douglas Murray
WE'RE ALL DOOMED
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century
By Eric Kaufmann (Profile Books 330pp £15)

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It is tough to think of a harder subject to tackle than demography. Vast, career-sized mantraps litter the way. Not only are there the perpetual disagreements over the science of the variables, there are also the considerable risks of telling a truth different from those in fashion.

In 1967 Peter Berger declared that American religiosity stood on the brink of decline. By the 1980s, with a visible upsurge in religious observance in the US (and the increasingly confident transfer of this observance into political activism), he was forced to recant. In 1968 Paul R Ehrlich predicted in his bestselling The Population Bomb that by the 1970s and 1980s overpopulation would lead to mass starvation. Ehrlich has recanted rather less. The Dutch politician Geert Wilders is currently on trial in the Netherlands for saying, among other things, that Muslims are set to become a majority in some Dutch cities. That this is true is not the point. Truth in this case is no defence.

It is very much to Eric Kaufmann's credit that he has written a book that is not only authoritative and fascinating but free of an agenda. He is not arguing a case so much as peeling back and exposing a layer of frequently unmentioned issues.

That said, his book is probably the most depressing that I have ever read. I recommend it, but only in small doses and for those with strong stomachs. Do not attempt to read even portions of it while hungover or otherwise downcast.

In saying this, I take it that readers of Literary Review are a distinctly educated, open-minded and cosmopolitan bunch. This is well and good. The message of this book can be boiled down to this: everyone like you, and everyone you like, is going to die out. And for the punchline: all the very worst people from every religion will win, by simple dint of breeding.

On current figures, the most fundamentalist Muslims are easily set to outbreed any co-religionists groping for enlightenment. The evangelical wings of Christianity will easily swamp the cultural, 'God, as it were' Anglicans. The most Orthodox Haredim will outnumber Reform Jews.

The Amish are on the increase. And to top it all, even the followers of Joseph Smith - noticeably advantaged by the boon of sanctioned polygamy - are set to win big in the coming centuries.

The global repercussions of this should be obvious. According to Kaufmann, the population of the Muslim world rose from 15 per cent of the world's population in 1970 to almost 20 per cent by 2000. It is expected to reach 23 per cent by 2025. During the same period the Christian proportion remained static at around 34 per cent and is expected to stay there for the next two decades. The population of the Arab world alone has risen from 80 million to 320 million in the last fifty years. Half of that population is under twenty.

If anyone is in any doubt about the effects this may have on a large scale one can simply reflect on its impact on a small one. One need only consider the case of Kosovo, which in the middle years of the last century saw roughly similar rates of population growth among Serbs and Albanians. From the 1960s onwards, higher Albanian and lower Serb fertility levels led to a range of tensions that, to put it mildly, did no good at all when Serbs were encouraged by Slobodan Milosevic to revive the notion of a 'Greater Serbia'.

Play similar population changes out with the most intransigent religious minorities and you can see what an unappealing place Kaufmann's projected future looks like. It might be best summed up by pointing out that, if you like the way the Middle East is shaping up now, you're going to love it in a few decades.

At every pass, man's attempts at civilisation have been challenged and often conquered by every variety of barbarianism. Perhaps, as Kaufmann's book does more than suggest, the relatively recent advance of secular liberal democracy will be no different. As Kaufmann asks: 'How can we be sure that religious demography won't simply overwhelm secularism much as waves of nomadic Turks erased the lettered Byzantines?'

Kaufmann is certainly onto something here. Western-style liberal democracies and the generally secularist - if not atheist - people who inhabit them too easily assume the vulgar Marxist tenet that history is a progress rather than a process - a matter of 'onwards and upwards'.

The enlightenment that a generation or two may achieve might signal its own demise by the increased disinclination of the enlightened to bother making their state any more than mono-generational. As Oswald Spengler wrote: 'When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard "having children" as a question of pros and cons, the great turning point has come.'

Kaufmann neatly points out that 'Most people get religion the old fashioned way: they inherit it.' He is noticeably pessimistic about the possibilities of society 'enforcing social cohesion by merely rational arguments', stating that this has never been done.

If I have a caveat to this otherwise all but unremittingly gloomy assessment, it is simply this. It is perfectly possible that Kaufmann is right. He is certainly correct when he argues that 'the titanic struggle between secularism and fundamentalism takes place on a battlefield tilted in favour of faith'. But to my mind he fails to consider sufficiently that a young man or woman from the population booms that Kaufmann accurately describes has as great an opportunity to break the shackles and renounce that trend as he or she does to follow a demographic trend as described. What happens to the youth wave of, for instance, Iran in the coming years will be a crucial indicator. If he and - more significantly - she can manage to throw off even some of the inherited shackles then the future is all to play for.

It is too early to know and the game is barely on. Needless to say we must all hope that for all his research and brilliance, Eric Kaufmann joins the Bergers and Ehrlichs. If he ever has cause to recant his thesis then we have reason to hope. If he is proved right then reason will have no place in whatever follows.

Douglas Murray is an author and the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion.