Philip Jenkins takes a look at recent article that wonders about whether the rest of the world will secularize in the way the West has and takes a look at my adopted country Sweden as a case study of whether what has become secular will stay secular.

Finally, might the move to that individualist/secular Utopia be a self-limiting cycle? Look at Sweden, which I have cited earlier as the textbook model for secularization, for individualism and for values based on self-expression. As an unavoidable part of that package, Sweden’s fertility rate fell to unsustainably low levels, which in turn meant bringing in lots of immigrants to keep the society functioning. Most of those migrants came from societies that were distinctly non-secular. Twenty percent of Sweden’s population is now foreign born, and the Muslim share of overall population is at least eight percent. (By way of comparison, the current US proportion of foreign-born is below fourteen percent, but the non-Christian share is much smaller). A secular liberal society thus creates the inevitable conditions for the increasing role of non-secular and (often) non-liberal populations.

Conversely, the old stock society reacts to that change by reverting to non-liberal and quite Traditional/Survival policies. The most significant development in that country in recent years has been the dramatic rise of the Sweden Democrats, a party with fascist antecedents, although it has since cleaned up its act quite considerably, purging most of the blatant Nazis and skinheads. Even so, SD has parlayed its anti-immigrant and anti-multicultural credentials into an impressive 21 percent of the national vote, making it the country’s second largest party. SD provides essential outside support to the Swedish ruling coalition created last year, an alliance of three other firmly Rightist parties.

The Sweden Democrats used to be more explicit about their roots, using pictures of burly Viking warriors with shields inscribed “Keep Sweden Swedish!” (You can trace their evolving symbols and iconography here). Or to return to the phrase I quoted earlier, “a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups.” Hold on, wasn’t that meant to be something we found in those old style poor Traditional/Survival societies, and not the modernized secular individualistic ones? Not in places like, well, Sweden? Now, the SD are absolutely not a religious party in any sense, and they represent no kind of Christian revival. But they certainly do manifest an unabashed revival of ethnocentric Traditional/Survival values of a kind that are surprising for prosperous Europe.

In passing, I am always amused to hear Americans hymn the praises of “Scandinavian social democracy,” which indicate that they (the hymners) have managed to miss the last couple of decades of that region’s history.

To take a related example, Germany is another very prosperous and developed country that stands high in the Secular/Self-Expression quadrant. Exactly like Sweden, it is also a land of historically low fertility and high immigration, which has opened the door to a far Right populist party very much like the Sweden Democrats, in the form of the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland. AfD is in the news currently as it is running at an alarming 21 percent in the polls, which is coincidentally the share of the vote that SD picked up last year in their country. A panicked German government is seriously considering banning AfD. Yes, obviously, Germans don’t want any kind of Nazi revival, but more immediately, they don’t want their party system to end up like Sweden’s.