Quakers still exist. But you are directionally correct.
There are like 100k Quakers left in the entire US. Even fewer depending on how important you judge continuity of method to be.
But yes. Quakers used to be something like 2/3rds of Pennsylvania and now they are a drop in the bucket and mostly old and dying.
It’s true, and I don’t see any good reason why this would change but the future is always uncertain. I couldn’t have predicted 2024 ten or fifteen years ago
That said I think the role of religion in fertility might even be underestimated. I know I know anecdotal evidence but I see so many families with 4+ kids at church and knowing what birth rates are like these days thats very unusual in the general population. According to this women who attend religious services weekly or more are right at replacement with 2.1 kids per woman, while women who never attend are 1.3. Women who sometimes attend are in the middle. And this pattern has persisted for at least 40 years in the US so it’s a reasonably good bet that it’ll continue.
It's obviously not high quality data and it's easy to think about how it could be biased downwards and not easy to think about how it could be biased upwards. But, communities living in the modern world(as opposed to Amish, Hasidim, etc) are probably not beating the tradcaths on fertility, so we can treat it as a reasonable upper bound.
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Notes -
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Quakers still exist. But you are directionally correct. There are like 100k Quakers left in the entire US. Even fewer depending on how important you judge continuity of method to be.
But yes. Quakers used to be something like 2/3rds of Pennsylvania and now they are a drop in the bucket and mostly old and dying.
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It’s true, and I don’t see any good reason why this would change but the future is always uncertain. I couldn’t have predicted 2024 ten or fifteen years ago
That said I think the role of religion in fertility might even be underestimated. I know I know anecdotal evidence but I see so many families with 4+ kids at church and knowing what birth rates are like these days thats very unusual in the general population. According to this women who attend religious services weekly or more are right at replacement with 2.1 kids per woman, while women who never attend are 1.3. Women who sometimes attend are in the middle. And this pattern has persisted for at least 40 years in the US so it’s a reasonably good bet that it’ll continue.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
The US tradcaths tried to estimate their own TFR with an internal survey and came up with 3.6(barely higher than the US as a whole in 1950). https://liturgyguy.com/2019/02/24/national-survey-results-what-we-learned-about-latin-mass-attendees/
It's obviously not high quality data and it's easy to think about how it could be biased downwards and not easy to think about how it could be biased upwards. But, communities living in the modern world(as opposed to Amish, Hasidim, etc) are probably not beating the tradcaths on fertility, so we can treat it as a reasonable upper bound.
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Lyman Stone seems to think that non-Abrahamic religions don’t bring any fertility premium.
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