Eric Kaufmann: belief

Transcript context

…But the most religious Americans with big families, sometimes extended families, they almost seem to be the strongest supporters of the American brand of liberal individualism. They’re not marrying their cousins per se, but — Well, depends which aspects of liberal individualism. They may give lip service to things like low tax and independence, but it’s not clear. If you consider individualism to also extend to expressive cultural forms, such as divorce or different forms of sexuality, then I think there would be more of a clash between that brand of, say, American Christianity or Christian fundamentalism and individualism. So yeah, I think economic individualism is probably okay, but the cultural or expressive kind, I think there would be more of a clash. The data are imperfect on this one, but you often hear it claimed that many parts of Africa — when they urbanize, they’re relatively slow to undergo secularization and falling birth rates. If you go to Nigeria, just visually, this seems to be true. There are churches everywhere. Do you have an account of why this might be the case?…

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