Demographic power

Peter Kopa, Prague, 21.3.2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws3jVXhUV_U

Peter Kopa, Prague 22.3.2024

Prof. Rodney Stark is one of the leading authorities on the sociology of religion. After a period of service in the US Army, Stark received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked as a research sociologist at the ‘Survey Research Center’ and the ‘Center for the Study of Law and Society’. For many years, the Pulitzer Prize nominee was a professor of sociology and professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington.  Although an agnostic, Stark is the author of more than 150 scholarly articles and 32 books in 17 different languages on the spread of Christianity in the early centuries.

Demographic Power in the Spread of Christianity

https://thinktanklatam.org/el-privilegio-de-los-hijos-de-familia/

Prof. Stark thinks that the spread of the Christian faith was not so much due to miracles or spectacular events, but mainly to the numerous children in Christian families. Thus, the conversion of the Roman Empire was brought about by the demographic power of the Christian family. Evidently, this was achieved as the fruit of the heroic preaching of the faith and its moral demands. Stark claims that the early Christians – contrary to the prejudice that the faith had spread among the poor – were educated people. Many of them were Greek Gentiles, who, precisely because of their philosophical notions, were in a better position to accept the doctrine of Christ preached by the Church.

Stark’s research indicates that the relatively small number of Christians in the middle of the first century grew demographically to such an extent that by the end of the fourth century it was more than half of the Roman population. Another interesting aspect is that this diffusion took place mainly in the cities and that in this process women played an important role. It must be taken into account that in that pagan Rome, the position of women was very low, to the point of being considered as a thing, by virtue of the misogynist culture then prevailing. Christian teaching gave her back her dignity and freedom, embracing her maternal vocation in the family. https://thinktanklatam.org/la-familia-y-el-auge-de-occidente/

Demographic power in the world

Let us now turn our attention to Muslim immigration in Europe. There is a growing conviction that this is a demographic weapon with which the globalists want to destroy European culture. There is no lack of Muslim religious authorities who insist that they will ‘eat’ this part of the world by force of their high birth rate. Today it is normal that, in any school class, half of the children do not speak German as their mother tongue, but Arabic, Turkish or another Middle Eastern or North African language.  It is therefore clear that Muslim integration in Europe is a big problem, with the constant danger of their radicalization, as is happening right now in Sweden, where the army has to be called in to help the police maintain a minimum of law and order.

At the end of 2022 there were four million Muslims in the UK, six million in Germany and in France. This is not counting the other non-Muslim groups. If all aborted or otherwise prevented children had been allowed to be born in Europe, we would have some forty-five million more Europeans today and there would have been no need for the immigrants as a labor force that the labor market partly demanded.

Demographic power also explains the mestizaje in Spanish America, where the indigenous people were not eliminated, unlike in North America. Here, the demographic mechanism worked in the proliferation of the white and black race. The latter was encouraged because Africans worked as slaves in the hard labor of farming. Another analogous case can be observed in the history of the people of Israel, how they multiplied rapidly during their stay in Egypt or upon their return from exile in Babylon.

Atypical demographic decline

The current mentality that tends to limit the number of children, if not to avoid them altogether, is a historically rare phenomenon that can only be explained by considering the penetration of ideas that erroneously place other values above children, such as material well-being, ecological concerns, etc. These are always ideologies without any basis in the nature of the human being, since anthropologically man cannot be totally fulfilled and happy if he does not respond to his maternal or paternal vocation. Only children ensure maximum happiness, even at the cost of sacrifice and renunciation.

This is a reality that until sixty years ago was taken for granted, as something independent and prior to any religious creed. In this sense, it is interesting to observe how in some places or cultures the desire for children is manifested. Such is the case of Vietnamese immigrants in the Czech Republic, simple people in Latin America and especially in Africa, where population growth is explosive. In other words, these are groups and places where the rationalist subculture of consumerist seduction that puts offspring in second place has not penetrated. https://thinktanklatam.org/navegamos-como-el-titanic/

Signs of hope for the future

The anti-birth atmosphere, which is sinking Europe, may well be like a bad cloud that can pass so that the sun can shine again in blue skies inside people. In the history of the world, the successive collapse of empires has always been due to the drop in births. The paradigmatic example in this regard is the long decline of the Roman Empire. And we are seeing in real time what is happening, in this sense, in the USA, Europe, Japan and some other important countries in Asia, and even in Latin America. It is true that ideas move the world, but for this there must be people, institutions and initiatives that make the ideals of a pro-life cultural renewal their own. It cannot be that the artistic monuments and infrastructures of Western Christian civilization fall into nothingness, or into other hands.