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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15369 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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I would love to optimistic here, but i simply don't see it.

I have good news for you!

Lets all face the music, Conservative America is simply going the way of the dinosaurs. We have a declining birth rate, religiosity is going down the toilet, marriage rates are going down toilet.

Nah. Religiosity seems to be leveling off and irreligiosity is holding steady or dropping. You flagged an article from 2019 on changing support for gay rights, but later studies are showing that the popularity of gay marriage may have peaked and its decline is driven by young Americans. And in Conservative America, the number of children is growing, driven by higher birth rates and the migration of families to Red States in the post-COVID timeframe. The highly religious have many more children than the irreligious, near replacement, and non-denominational/Pentecostal Christian denominations (who tend towards political conservativism) are likely to continue growing given current trends.

I don't think we should extrapolate wildly and irresponsibly from current trends now any more than we should have in 2010, or that things are all gravvy (for Americans writ large, or conservative Americans, or religious Americans, or what have you) but Conservative America is very far from dead, and is arguably the part of America that is furthest from dead.

Evangelicals have high birth rates, but also low retention rates into adulthood.

Gays have lower fertility than straights, so surely we will have no gays at all within a few generations!

Minor correction- thé highly religious have a replacement birth rate. Secular conservatives have near replacement.

Red tribe spaces like bass pro shop are full of kids. Parents of young children are like R+20. A crude correlate between birthrate and county vote share gives counties above 80% Republican as the threshold for replacement. There are two large American cohorts that are mostly replacing themselves- republicans and Hispanics.

White liberals, on the other hand, have a birthrate like Asians do.

thé highly religious have a replacement birth rate.

Awesome. The source I grabbed had the number bouncing around a bit, but it's also a few years out of date.

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