I do not understand the @SohrabAhmari / @DouthatNYT disagreement on the future "Catholic" character of American religion: PRLS 2014 data is abundantly clear that Catholic net conversion rates are abysmally low.
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Without immigration, the Catholicism would be declining even faster than the mainlines. That's the unavoidable conclusion from RCC's own data on baptisms as well.
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And, to be clear, it's not because of unusually high rates of people leaving the church. It's because of peculiarly low rates of conversion *into* the church.
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People-not-raised-Catholic make up ~10% of Catholics in America. People-not-raised-Evangelical-Protestant make up 39% of Evangelical Protestants. Here's a graph:pic.twitter.com/7arEu63cvv
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Nor is Catholic fertility particularly high. Here's completed fertility by religious tradition compared to what they would have needed to have in order to grow.pic.twitter.com/QyxYv7Dcbp
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Catholic women had a very similar number of babies as Evangelical Protestant and Historically Black Protestant women. But not enough to offset the negative conversion balance.
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The math for these fertility balances implicitly assume that it's a closed population. This is a way of saying, "Had there been no immigration, Catholicism would be declining as fast or faster than the Mainline."
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Mormons, the nonreligious, Evangelical Protestants, and of course the Amish are all having enough babies to reproduce themselves given current conversion rates. Catholics and Mainliners are not.
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If you assume relative fertility and conversion rates from 1990-2014 are the same for 2014-2104, which would be ridiculous but hey why the heck not make a simplifying assumption, then here's what happens to population shares:pic.twitter.com/ePb6YD9wCO
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Again, this basically assumes zero immigration. In reality there will be immigration. It will especially boost the "Other Religions" and "Catholic" shares, but also may boost, depending on exact details, nonreligious, Mormon/JW, or Evangelical Protestants.
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So I don't REALLY think this graph represents what WILL happen, because fertility and conversion patterns change over time, and because immigration can cause big changes. But this is still an informative exercise.
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But TO BE CLEAR, it's not that Evangelical Protestants have some marginal advantage over Catholics, as
@DouthatNYT would suggest. LITERALLY THE ONLY reason we aren't discussing the massive collapse of Catholicism in America is immigration,@SohrabAhmari .Show this thread -
And to be clear this is not just a "smaller share but bigger population" thing. No. That's a declining nominal population of Catholics. That's closed churches and empty seminaries.
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I don't say this to gloat. I take no pleasure in the closure of a congregation of people confessing the Creeds and receiving the Lord's Supper, whether Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, or whatever. I say it because the terms being discussed are just way too chill.
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Now let me add that I don't really "buy" the Evangelical Protestant numbers. EvProts did well in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, but have taken a turn south since. PRLS data I use is veeeery backward-looking. I suspect the EvProt share is overstated.
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End of conversation
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