Part of me doesn’t even think this article deserves any comment, but the other part of me is nudging me, saying, “c’mon, you know you want to.”

The hypothesis put forward is: the decline in fertility is the cause of secularization. Apparently, this is some sort of reversal, but I don’t know anybody that is claiming the opposite (it seems to be one of those “common sense” things that, when you think about it, really doesn’t make any sense).

I would posit that the two trends–declining religiosity and declining birthrates (among whites, anyway)–are related, but not causally related. If there is a causal link between them, I would say that it’s a relatively weak influence in comparison to what I’m going to propose.

Obviously, the reasons why people decide to identify themselves with atheism are varied. For me, it was about intellectual honesty and consistency, but I might be in the minority. However, the general trend of being very religious has a fairly strong inverse correlation with individual happiness. The best system so far for producing individual happiness is the free market (this has a very specific definition and does not include corporatism nor mercantilism, also known as fascism). Basically, if your needs are provided for and you are generally happy, you do not need to spend your time being religious as there is nothing for you to escape.

The overall decline of birthrate is related to the rise of the free market as well. Prior to industrialization, if you wanted to have children support you in your old age, you needed to have quite a lot of them, especially since many of them died in infancy and childhood. As medicine improved and the free market began to open up more opportunities for people (less grueling work and higher-paying jobs), people did not need to have as many children in order to survive. There are, of course, other reasons to have children, but this is definitely a factor.

However, as time went on and state power grew (that is, the level of taxation increased), it became that much more difficult for people to have more children than they might have had otherwise. At the very bottom of the rung, of course, we are aware of the welfare-mom stereotype, which is another effect of state power and would most likely not survive very long if the welfare system was not around.

The biggest blow came when the workforce was opened to women. Instead of increasing overall household income, the state was able to raise taxes to the point where both parents in many homes had to work. The option of staying home was severely curtailed for a large number of workers, and so, one may well decide to not have children at all in order to spare them the latchkey child scenario.

If there is a causal link between religiosity and fertility, it pales in comparison to the forces of the free market, which provide positive incentives to have fewer children (reduced necessity for elderly care, better quality of life overall for all concerned), and to the forces of the state, which provide negative incentives to have fewer children (increased taxation, forcing both parents to work just to get by), unless, of course, you are on welfare, in which case your children will almost certainly live their adult lives in the same situation and will almost certainly not escape from it.