I've come across an interesting essay that I think outlines perfectly, in an almost secular way, the agenda of the religious right -
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/....
Every political ideology has a basis in some fact. Marxism is based on the poor treatment of 19th century workers. Nazism grew out of the harsh treatment Germany recieved after WWI, feeding a persecution complex that fueled their ideology and swelled their ranks. The Religious right's ideology has as it's core declining fertility rates in the industrialized world, views it as a threat to national security, and puts the blame squarely at the feet of secularism.
Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It's more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best.
As just an historical observation it's based on shaky reasoning, but harmless. The danger comes, like with Marxism, when it's not enough to just sit around and twiddle your thumbs waiting for the inevitable, but a 'party vanguard' must be formed to poke and prod history towards it's inevitable conclusion. That is the role groups such as 'Focus on the Family' and the like are providing today. What does their inevitable society look like? And why do they think it is inevitable?
Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.
Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents' investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.
Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this particular social system--which involves far more than simple male domination--maximized their population and therefore their power, whereas those that didn't were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but it is set to make a comeback.
It gets worse, but the foundation is in place, and you can see where this is going. So many desparate political viewpoints begin to merge. For the survival of our society, we must return to a patriarchal system that promotes increased child birth. Since this is a matter of survival, people who support things such as gay marriage, abortion, and women's rights at best are bumbling fools staggering toward the cliff of extinction, at worst, enemies of our society. Sound familiar?
Now, we see why the more secular neo-conservatives in the Republican party become strange bedfellows with the religious right -
The historical relation between patriarchy, population, and power has deep implications for our own time. As the United States is discovering today in Iraq, population is still power. Smart bombs, laser-guided missiles, and unmanned drones may vastly extend the violent reach of a hegemonic power. But ultimately, it is often the number of boots on the ground that changes history. Even with a fertility rate near replacement level, the United States lacks the amount of people necessary to sustain an imperial role in the world, just as Britain lost its ability to do so after its birthrates collapsed in the early 20th century. For countries such as China, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, in which one-child families are now the norm, the quality of human capital may be high, but it has literally become too rare to put at risk.
Now, please, control your laughter. Yes, he is saying that the reason that we are failing in Iraq is because America was too secularized 18 years ago (smack dab in the middle of the Reagan Era) to have enough children to serve in the military. He also makes a ludicrous claim about British power - British colonial history, in fact colonial history in general, is a history of small numbers of imperial troops relying on better technology to rule vast populations. At the height of the British Raj in India, there were maybe 4000 British running the entire society. The human meat grinders that were WWI and WWII did far more to sap British military strength than any declining population rate. But I digress. It's important to remember that it's not so much whether you believe it, or even that it makes sense, what's important is a large enough number of people do believe it to make it dangerous.
So now we have the foreign policy of the Bush Administration covered, does any of this apply to the domestic agenda?
Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today's headlines. The long-term financing of social security schemes, private pension plans, and healthcare systems has little to do with people living longer. Gains in life expectancy at older ages have actually been quite modest, and the rate of improvement in the United States has diminished for each of the last three decades. Instead, the falling ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were never born. As governments raise taxes on a dwindling working-age population to cover the growing burdens of supporting the elderly, young couples may conclude they are even less able to afford children than their parents were, thereby setting off a new cycle of population aging and decline.
So now the secularization of America started by despicable liberals is responsible for the demise of their own big government agenda!
What place do women have in this 'make a baby for Jesus' society? You can probably guess:
Under patriarchy, "bastards" and single mothers cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children do not take their fathers' name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, "legitimate" children become a source of either honor or shame to their fathers and the family line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their fathers' family, and not to their mothers', which has no basis in biology, gives many men powerful emotional reasons to want children, and to want their children to succeed in passing on their legacy. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having children until they produce at least one son.
Another key to patriarchy's evolutionary advantage is the way it penalizes women who do not marry and have children. Just decades ago in the English-speaking world, such women were referred to, even by their own mothers, as spinsters or old maids, to be pitied for their barrenness or condemned for their selfishness. Patriarchy made the incentive of taking a husband and becoming a full-time mother very high because it offered women few desirable alternatives.
It's important here to note the implied notions here. Remember, it's single mothers who can't be tolerated. The men who father these 'bastards' get off scott free. It's the fault of the woman that the man doesn't want to take responsibility for the child.
We also see here discrimination of women in the workplace and the removal of their equal status to men actually becomes an issue of national security. Now I see why they think feminists hate America so.
You may say 'what they want is the Talibanization of America!' You couldn't be further from the truth.
Today, after all, we associate patriarchy with the hideous abuse of women and children, with poverty and failed states. Taliban rebels or Muslim fanatics in Nigeria stoning an adulteress to death come to mind. Yet these are examples of insecure societies that have degenerated into male tyrannies, and they do not represent the form of patriarchy that has achieved evolutionary advantage in human history. Under a true patriarchal system, such as in early Rome or 17th-century Protestant Europe, fathers have strong reason to take an active interest in the children their wives bear. That is because, when men come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as upholders of a patriarchal line, how those children turn out directly affects their own rank and honor.
So there you have it. This won't devolve into a Taliban-like torture state because, well... because it won't.
But don't worry women, you still have choices:
As feminist economist Nancy Folbre has observed, "Patriarchal control over women tends to increase their specialization in reproductive labor, with important consequences for both the quantity and the quality of their investments in the next generation." Those consequences arguably include: more children receiving more attention from their mothers, who, having few other ways of finding meaning in their lives, become more skilled at keeping their children safe and healthy. Without implying any endorsement for the strategy, one must observe that a society that presents women with essentially three options--be a nun, be a prostitute, or marry a man and bear children--has stumbled upon a highly effective way to reduce the risk of demographic decline.
What's the only thing that can pull this utopia down? Well, it's own success of course:
Often, all that sustains the patriarchal family is the idea that its members are upholding the honor of a long and noble line. Yet, once a society grows cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples, and new luxuries, this sense of honor and connection to one's ancestors begins to fade, and with it, any sense of the necessity of reproduction. "When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard `having children' as a question of pro's and con's," Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher, once observed, "the great turning point has come."
That bit is absolutely amazing. Take some time to let it sink in. What destroys societies is growing cities, free thought, immigration, and increasing wealth. It answers so many questions, it doesn't need comment.
If you aren't convinced that liberals are trying to destroy America, remember, America's strength is based on the number of babies being born, then check this out:
We may witness a similar transformation during this century. In Europe today, for example, how many children different people have, and under what circumstances, correlates strongly with their beliefs on a wide range of political and cultural attitudes. For instance, do you distrust the army? Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ronny Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids--or ever to get married and have kids--than those who say they have no objection to the military. Or again, do you find soft drugs, homosexuality, and euthanasia acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? For whatever reason, people answering affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live alone, or in childless, cohabitating unions, than those who answer negatively.
How about public school?
Many childless, middle-aged people may regret the life choices that are leading to the extinction of their family lines, and yet they have no sons or daughters with whom to share their newfound wisdom. The plurality of citizens who have only one child may be able to invest lavishly in that child's education, but a single child will only replace one parent, not both. Meanwhile, the descendants of parents who have three or more children will be hugely overrepresented in subsequent generations, and so will the values and ideas that led their parents to have large families.
There must not be any, because a childless person who feels they have something to teach the next generation can't become a teacher. As for the seemingly genetic passing of ideas from generation to generation, how many people here differ politically from their parents? Oops, forgot, they already eliminated new ideas.
But this is answered too:
One could argue that history, and particularly Western history, is full of revolts of children against parents. Couldn't tomorrow's Europeans, even if they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded households, turn out to be another generation of '68?
The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents' values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.
This is difficult to accept too. Wasn't the 'flower generation' protesting AGAINST their parents? Have their been a study that suggests the increased rebelliousness of the baby boom generation was instilled in them by their parents?
As for social programs like social security, they need to be taken down like a Buddhist statue:
Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating traditional religious values akin to the Bible's injunction to honor thy mother and father.
The removal of state support, like social security, will force people to have larger families to take care of them in old age, since they can't rely on the government anymore, and pushing Christianity on them will guilt them into taking care of them in old age.
The golden nugget - and it's most sinister aspect - of the religious right's political agenda lies here:
Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.
Here is where it becomes almost Marxist. In Marxism, the decreasing living conditions of the working class binds them closer and closer together, until at some point there is a crisis, and the working class spontaneously rises up and throws off the bourgeousie, and ushers in a worker's paradise. Paradoxically, it is in the societies most advanced, most doused with the benefits and evils of capitalism, that this revolution will occur. Where capitalism is the strongest, it is the weakest.
The religious right here has a similar scenario. Where societies are most socialistic, they are most ripe for religious revolution. At some point, the state will fail, and the religious fundamentalists will rise up and free us from our secular shackles like social security and welfare. The price we must pay to live in this religious utopia? Our individuality, for only then can we fully 'submit to father.'