What is the Destiny in Demography is Destiny?

4/13/2024

Some form of society is, of course, necessary. It doesn’t hurt that society is also something we all have in common, something we all participate into some greater or lesser degree, and something we all have opinions about regardless of personal assumptions. All this and more helps explain why nearly all bloggers — yours truly included — focus on social themes and issues at least some of the time.

Having said that, society can also be a demonic snare, particularly for Christians. Societal concerns are important, but for Christians, they should not be primary — especially in light of what transpired four years ago and everything that has happened since. When Christians make society their overarching concern now, they slip away from Christianity and enter the realm of what might be called Societianity with its incessant and obsessive focus on “communities.”

It bears keeping in mind that our current and often obsessive focus on all things social stems mostly from, Auguste Comte, the father of Positivism, and others of his ilk. Some say Comte even coined the term sociology, which is relevant when you consider how much time bloggers spend studying and commenting on society.

I am not implying that people did not think about, study, or write about society before Auguste Comte; however, when they did, they did so from assumptions that included belief in religion, divinity, and the supernatural. The same is not true of Comte and most so-called sociologists of the past two or three centuries.

Why is this important? For the simple reason that a great deal of secular — nay, explicitly anti-God, anti-Creation — sociological thinking, tenets, and assumptions permeate contemporary Christian social commentary on human social behavior, organization, relationships, power structures, and so forth.

Such permeations are most explicit in so-called Christian approaches that regard human society as the most important and pressing thing in the world, with the establishment and maintenance of an exclusively Christian society as the highest calling to which a Christian can aspire in mortal life.

Justifications for the “society uber alles” approach in contemporary Christianity are based primarily on ideas like demography is destiny. All quite sound and logical, but it is worth noting that Auguste Comte is credited with the demography is destiny phrase. Even if he didn’t utter it, you can rest assured that someone with assumptions similar to his did.

So, if or when Christians feel motivated to discuss the effects of declining, sub-fertile populations and mass migration on once predominately Christian nations, they must do so from assumptions that rise above Comte’s materialism when he coined the term.

Sadly, the assumptions Christians communicate when discussing demography or any other society-related issue rarely rise above such basic positivist assumptions.

14 Comments

Anti-Gnostic

4/14/2024 05:06:38

To answer the question posed, if you replace Anglo-Americans with Meso-Americans, you will get Meso-America. If you replace Byzantine Christians with Arab Muslims it's no longer Byzantium; it's the Rashidun Caliphate.

In other words, people make countries. Somali Muslims don't turn into Swedish atheists much less Swedish Lutherans upon touching down on that Magic Scandinavian Dirt.

Demography is destiny in Christianity as well. The Germans become Lutheran, the English become Anglican, Egyptians become Coptic, individualistic Americans become a thousand different Protestants etc. Cultural follower-countries in the Global South become whichever American or European missionaries can get there first.

Francis Berger

4/14/2024 07:06:26

@ Anti-Gnostic - I find it interesting that demography only became destiny once people began to regard demography and everything else from a purely secular or severely crippled/corrupted this-worldly religious perspective.

Demography is destiny appears to have been innately ingrained in human consciousness before that, without much need for promtotion, discussion, or study.

4/14/2024 14:31:09

Demography has always been destiny, just like the Sun has always been a ball of hydrogen and helium plasma since long before people stopped believing it was Apollo in his chariot.

Here's another bombshell: education doesn't generate intelligence. It's actually, hilariously g-hollow considering all the time and resources lavished on it.

JMSmith link

4/14/2024 15:42:44

You are right that politics is like quicksand: those who get into it have a hard time getting out. It is certainly wrong to treat politics as the ultimate value, but one cannot ignore it. It is like the equally carnal value of nutrition. It is gluttony to treat eating as the ultimate value, but it is death to treat it as no value at all.

The Left is nowadays stigmatizing what we might call demographic anxiety, but this is dishonest. The Left has its own demographic anxiety, which is the survival of the nations. In any case, to ignore demography is to implicitly affirm what demography will do if it is ignored by people like one's self.

4/14/2024 20:03:17

@ JM - Yes. If we ignore politics entirely, we cannot engage in discernment, but there is little meaningful discernment in Christian thinking these days. In light of that, I would hazard to say that most Christians would be better off ignoring politics altogether. Unresolved materialism has constipated Christian thinking. It desperately needs an enema, especially when it comes things like demography and other issues of society.

4/14/2024 19:49:44

@ Anti-Gnostic - Destiny is the key word here. From a purely this-worldly perspective, the destiny of all demographics is ultimately death, which is what makes Comte's declaration so shallow.

Demographics alone does not suffice, or, it can only suffice if one is like Comte and rejects God, the divine, and Creation. However, a purely material view of demography just is insufficient, which perhaps helps explain why modern people are no longer all that interested in reproducing.

If demography is to be considered at all, it must include something that aims for something higher within this-world while overcoming the value inversions and nihilism that a purely material perspective on demography ultimately generates.

4/15/2024 00:18:05

Well, I should have asked what "destiny" to which you were referring. If my neighbor asks me, "Where are you going?," I'll generally say, "To the grocery store," not "To the death ordained for all men, and afterward to Heaven God willing." When my neighbor responds that he was just curious where I was headed out the door just now, I can scold him for his cribbed, materialist view.

In the present which we inhabit for around 70 - 80 years, we have to decide how best to live and thrive and how to nurture and protect ourselves and our families, and what kind of place we're leaving our successors. You can only do this in the context of a human society. For such matters, demography is indeed destiny.

Nobody knows what Heaven is like or who will ultimately qualify for the Blessed state. The older I get the less I'm convinced "How do I get to Heaven?" is the relevant question.

4/15/2024 05:16:07

@ Anti-Gnostic - I ended this post with this paragraph:

"Sadly, the assumptions Christians communicate when discussing demography or any other society-related issue rarely rise above such basic positivist assumptions."

Your comment above provides a good example of an inability or unwillingness to rise above basic postivitist/material assumptions.

That's not something I want to argue about. You're entitled to hold such a perspective, but you have to acknowledge it and take responsibility for it, which I assume, you have done.

4/15/2024 11:13:08

@ Anti-Gnostic - Just one more point,

"The older I get the less I'm convinced "How do I get to Heaven?" is the relevant question."

This is very revelatory, on several levels. I hate to break it to you, but it is also fundamentally anti-Christian in its implications.

It outright questions and perhaps rejects the resurrected life Jesus offers. At the very least, it implies that you believe heaven or belief in resurrected life to be irrelevant to our current life goals, beliefs, endeavors, and behavior -- and if not irrelevant, then of far lesser significance than purely this-worldly considerations like society or demography.

If that's what you believe, then knock yourself out, but I suggest you reconsider what you have expressed here.

4/15/2024 15:02:20

Yes, I'm familiar with that line of argument. It no longer has any potency as Christians are no longer able to explicate the True Faith. Apparently now it's some combination of the Gospel of John (who's actually Lazarus) and the Book of Mormon.

Christians have used the question to cede God's Creation, collapse their institutions, render their children into strangers in their own homelands, and withdraw into gnostic book clubs. They are effectively just waiting to die.

If Christianity at this point is just every man for himself, then all formal catechesis, liturgy, and praxis has ceased and anyone else's theological and metaphysical musings are as valid as your own.

4/15/2024 15:44:43

@ Anti-Gnostic - I sense that the commerce between us is dissipating.

If deriding my assumptions is the sole motivating factor behind your comments, then I respectfully ask that you desist from commenting here.

4/15/2024 19:41:01

You asked what the destiny was in Comte's framing and I told you: for example, an Anglo-America that replaces Anglo-Americans with Meso-Americans becomes Meso-America. When Byzantium falls, it's replaced by the Caliphate. You said not that destiny but the ultimate human destiny which, as nobody has any demonstrable, objective knowledge 1) does not strike me as particularly useful and 2) represents a novel trend among Christians to retreat from the hard business of living, to the point of rejecting even Christian community and growing ourselves in our own pews. This is an astonishing historical and intellectual development.

The exceptions, interestingly, would appear to be the rigorously socially organized Amish and Mormons (though I know more ex-Mormons than Mormons at this point).

Speaking of, the Amish and Mormons both assign some degree of spiritual significance to ancestry and demographics, as do other religious faiths, like the Druze, Judaism, and Hindu.

4/15/2024 21:09:08

@ AG - This whole post is about Christians not rising above postivist assumptions, and then you come at me with nothing but positivist/material assumptions.

You're doing nothing more than proving the point I made in the post!

1) "Nobody has any objective, demonstrable proof about heaven or post-resurrection life." Pure positivism!

2) "Not useful" - ah, material utility. Again, positivistic.

3) "Retreat from the business of hard living" - Taking personal responsibility for one's faith and destiny qualifies as hard living in my book. Much harder than the life of a pew sitter who bows his head meekly to any and all external authorities regardless of what they demand of him. But I guess hard living in your book involves a servile bowing down to the collective, kind of like Auguste Comte envisioned:

"The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction."

Once again, pure positivism!

4) I never stated that demographics, society, or ancestry were irrelevant, but that they must be approached via assumptions that transcend positivism/materialism to be truly relevant. You seem incapable of doing that, which means your commentary -- sound as it may appear to you -- misses the mark entirely.

4/15/2024 22:15:10

An insulting, childish and poorly argued response. Good day.

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What is the Destiny in Demography is Destiny?

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