One of the things that grabs my interest are the big trends and changes that we experience either within a culture or across cultures. These are the currents that move the oceans of our culture, the tectonic plates on which our nations rise and fall, they shift imperceptibly most of the time but every now and then they cause everyone to notice what is going on. In this particular article I want to highlight some trends that WILL happen and therefore it would be wise of the church to get its thinking straight as soon as possible.
There are two big trends that are coinciding that will only serve to amplify other significant cultural changes: one is population growth and the other is birth rate decline. Together these two trends are going to reshape the world. But not everywhere equally. It will be both global and local. Some cultures will permanently changed and others maybe not at all.
Population Growth
The global population continues to grow and will likely peak at the end of this century (when I will be 125) at around 10.4 billion. That’s a significant number and it’s adding two billion more people than are currently on the planet today.
There are three main reasons for this. Massive improvements across the world in infant mortality means fewer babies die young which means many more children. Then this is followed by increases in life expectancy which means many more old people. And thirdly sustained high birth rates in the southern hemisphere which mostly means many more poor people. As you can see from the chart below that the share of the global total is dominated by the two biggest regions: Asia & Africa. Notice that Asia peaks around 2040 but Africa’s share continues to expand all the way until 2100.
For Africa and the rest of the world this poses a huge challenge. It’s likely that in a continent mired in corruption, bedeviled by violence and insurgencies, shackled by the injustices of colonialism and the challenges of development that the huge rise in the population will be enough to keep Africa poor. It seems unlikely that the economies of Africa can generate enough jobs & grow fast enough to deal with these huge challenges.
The challenge for everyone else comes because Africa is also likely to be the most impacted by climate change. Huge swathes of Africa are likely to become unlivable. If you look at map C below – anywhere in red is either too hot, too dry, or too poor to sustain significant populations.
At the moment a surprisingly low figure of 250 million people worldwide live outside the country of their birth (I’m one of them). This article suggests that anywhere between 1.5-3.5 billion people may be on the move (north or south but mostly north) in search of a better place to live. Climate change will move people. Poverty will move people. People will move.
So Southern Americans may move south but most likely they will look to move north. And where will Africans go? Some will of course try their hand going west, some will go anywhere they can but most will go straight north to Europe.
And this may be just what Europe needs.
Birth rate collapse
The world population is growing but for many countries their populations are falling and in some cases precipitously so.
Everywhere in blue is having less babies than they need to sustain their populations. More than half of us may end up without descendants, More Adults Are Choosing to Live Childfree And They Probably Won’t Change Their Minds, Births in Sweden are at their lowest in 20 years (Swedish), Baby bust: China’s looming demographic disaster, Women Who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids Are Getting Richer. These articles are everywhere and they pose massive problems for governments. The reason is a country needs enough working people to support all the people not working and with more people living much longer that means tens and hundreds of millions of people in their 70s to 90s and an increasing number making it past 100.
So for example, China: “Today, every 100 working-age Chinese need to support 20 retirees. If trends continue, by the turn of the next century, every 100 workers will have to support 120 retirees.” And that story is repeated everywhere. And one solution to this which most Western countries have adopted is immigration. Import the workers you need from places where people are happy to leave. In essence it’s a win-win.
This doesn’t work for everyone though – Asia and countries like China or Japan would struggle with migration. Their cultures are generally closed, their languages notoriously difficult to learn and in China’s case it is a dictatorship and they usually prove relatively unappealing.
Mitigating circumstances
There are some investments that must be made because they’re the right thing to do. It’s proven that development, and in particular the education and empowerment of women, that has the most dramatic effect on birth rates. If Africa make serious strides in development more people will stay put and there will be less pressure on local populations. At the same time if climate change is mitigated across the sub-Saharan belt then there will be less pressure to leave. Both those big goals must be attempted but I’m not hopeful.
Culture Change
The challenge is that migration is incredibly difficult to control and it seems highly likely that far more people will want to move to Europe than Europe wants to receive and this creates all sorts of problems. Governments have generally done a poor job of explaining the need for immigration and underestimated or dismissed the cultural upheaval this causes. The reasons for this are many but I suspect that for the richest (who are generally in government) immigration is seen either in abstract terms or as personally beneficial.
But as right-wing anti-immigration political parties grow all across Europe (the Sweden Democrats for example just gained a 20% share of the vote at the recent election) there is a growing pressure to shut the doors of Europe and keep them shut.
What seemed to be missed was that not everyone who moves to Europe would adopt or want to adopt Europe’s secular culture & values and this would lead to clashes, misunderstandings, and a sense of cultural displacement.
Faith change
Yet one of the changes to impact the next century will be the decline of atheism and the resurgence of faith. As atheists and agnostics alike have fewer children and die off they will be replaced by religious Africans who will be either Muslim or Christian. This means the long ballyhooed end of faith is premature. For Christians it’s entirely possible that the Lord of the Harvest is sending hundreds of thousands of workers into the European fields.
Yet it’s possible that the churches in Europe will be more hindrance than help if that does indeed happen. A genuinely multi-cultural church is incredibly challenging to build. Ceding leadership and authority to people who will change the way things are done can be hard to accept. And the obstacles are far more likely to be cultural than theological. Our African brothers & sisters are more conservative than most European evangelicals but that will prove less of a problem than all the dancing and shouting that many of them do while they worship and the utter lack of enthusiasm (as they see it) while we do.
If Stockholm is anything to go by (it might not be) migrants will for cultural and linguistic reasons have a strong preference to worship in their own communities and the established churches are happy to let them. The effect of this is highly religious silos amongst a highly irreligious culture and never the twain shall meet. As a result the church may well die while all the while ignoring the medicine necessary to keep it alive.
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