The Family as Sub-Contractor for the State

One point I keep on trying to pound home is that political debate in the USA is often fundamentally distorted by an ignorance of what the our history actually was. I would like to extend this argument to family policy.

Today we have two points of view on the family and the state. Both assume that the family and the state as autonomous organizations are opposed: a strong, purposeful state means a weak, passive family and vice versa. Liberals think the state should exercise stronger, more purposeful collective powers over citizens for their own good, but that the family should have less strong, purposeful collective powers over its members for their own good. Conservatives (especially paleo-conservatives and religious libertarians) think the state should exercise weaker, less purposeful collective power over citizens for their own good, but that the family should have stronger, more purposeful collective powers over its members for their own good. Strong state, weak family or strong family, weak state. Either/or.

Going along with this assumption of antagonism is a false view of history. Liberal historians look for evidence that the state has traditionally had more powers to regulate families than we think, thinking that this would prove that the autonomous family has weak historical roots. Likewise, conservative historians like to emphasize how even state powers over the family we now take for granted didn’t used to exist in the part, thinking that this would emphasize how families resisting interference from the state is an old, old tradition.

For Eurasian societies as widely distributed as Puritan New England, Württemberg peasants from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and Mongolian and Tibetan nomadic societies*, however, either way of understanding state-family relations was alien. Rather than real family-state praxis, the conventional opposition of family and state reflects only crude and unreflective 19th century post-French Revolution social theories, the phlogistons of social theory. And even today, I think this old praxis survives, despite having no articulation, since the liberal and conservative intellectuals are still divided into "let's have more/less phlogiston!" parties.

In this different praxis the traditional family is itself a sub-contractor of the state (or if you prefer, the community as a whole). As a sub-contracting organization of the state-community, the family is represented by its head. It has a responsibility for producing a number of things for the state: as a rule taxes, in some states trained and equipped soldiers, for some families responsible officials, and in every case, children who will be able to play the contractor role in the next generation. In the Greek city states, performance of such public functions by private families were called "liturgies." Depending on the type of society, this might also involve making sure the children are equipped by literacy to respond to community admonitions (texts, government decrees, scriptures, etc.) It will in any case require that children be trained in the appropriate moral code to be hard-working, responsible contractors themselves. Since the family as a contracting unit for the state/community has a duty to produce both specific persons (soldiers, officials, corvee laborers, as the case may be), and future contractors, unwillingness to procreate is a selfish betrayal of the community/state.

In order to make sure that the sub-contractor can do its job, the state also parcels out to the family a significant chunk of its own authority, entrusting certain police and juridical functions to the heads of the households over the members (and to elders over juniors generally). The head of the family that acts to some degree as an agent of the state’s authority, even as he (or sometimes she, as a widow) resides on his ancestral patrimony. This patrimony is itself a fund for the performance of contracted obligations to the state.

The state/community’s interest in the family is therefore in keeping the sub-contractors functioning. One essential precondition of this is that the family has to have its own resources. The family has to have a sufficient fund of resources, tangible and intangible, to work with to produce the outputs it needs. A family with no land and no skills cannot fulfill its tax obligations. For that reason bad management, such as drinking one’s patrimony away, breaking it up with an irresponsible divorce, and so on, should not be tolerated. And if a family falls into that situation, it needs to have property restored and disciplined so this doesn’t happen again. Moreover, since only a family can produce the necessary outputs demanded by the community, individuals who are without family need to be put into a family.

Social policy in this "family as sub-contractor for the state" assumes a peculiar cast which the liberal-conservative point of view today is almost guaranteed to misunderstand. In it, what looks like charity is simultaneously fiscality: the state gives aid not just to help the individuals involved, but also to get the family receiving the aid back on its feet as a tax-paying/soldier-supplying/official-providing contracting unit. Equality is thus not just, or even primarily, a goal of such assistance, but rather a means to an end: the maximum possible effective provision of necessary persons/goods for the state and community. This is so even when the primary way of supplying such aid is not directly state to family, but lateral: neighbor to neighbor, or even structured by kinship (redemption right of land that might be sold to strangers). For example in the Secret History of the Mongols, we read that the emperor Ögedei ordered one sheep out of a hundred taken from each person and given to the poor in his own unit. This was in part to "let them put their feet on the soil and their hands on the land" but was just as much connected with the periodic renumbering of militiamen in the Mongol army to make sure that each unit had enough prosperous families to supply its share of taxes and soldiers. Among Tibetan pastoralists, Rinzin Thargyal describes how one ambitious lord encouraged the formation of functioning households. When a girl got "knocked up," he would pressure the man responsible into marrying her, loan the new family animals to herd, and hold off on demanding labor service from them until they were a going concern. He did the same with poor immigrants arriving in his estate: find them a wife or husband as needed, loan them animals, and get them going. As a result his estate was unusually prosperous, and his population -- and influence -- grew rapidly. In these cases, charity merges with the aim to preserve family units as sub-contractors of the state. Note also that almost all such societies also had distinctions of families: some produced taxes, others produced soldiers, others produced officials, and these status distinctions are maintained as part of the same system imperatives that forces one family of tax payers to give aid to another family of tax payers facing the danger of break-up and dispersal. In the Tibetan case, for example, the aristocratic household so actively building up its followings' families itself had to supply officials to the Dege principality.

A very common way to maintain households facing crisis is through redemption laws, specifying that households sell their property it may be redeemed from the buyer by a relative or neighbor of the seller. Redemption within the collateral family line, as found in the Mosaic laws in the Bible, is quite common comparatively, and can be found in eighteenth century Germany, as well as Qing dynasty China. Usually interpreted solely as part of compassion for the “poor” (although structurally at least the real poor in ancient Israelite society were not the full-blooded Israelites who had fields subject to such redemption, but the strangers and aliens who did not), this collateral redemption was actually an important part of fiscality (state tax policy) as were the limitations on mobility (in a weak state apparatus, staying in one place so the state can find you is important). Theologically as Christopher H. Wright in God's People in God's Land has pointed out, this works as an analogy: just as earthly kings demand a regimes of sub-contractor families, so the divine King demands a regime of sub-contractor families. Traditional sociological interpretation of this practice/ideal in the context Israelite history has usually read this as a survival of primitive tribalism, resisting the imposition of royal tyranny. In this comparative context, however, I think a better argument could be made that the importance of redemption indicates not "tribalism" but a strong state/community interest in preserving a network of effective sub-contracting and tax-paying militia families.**

Inversely, the elimination of the redemption regime (which took place in Würtemburg for example in the early nineteenth century or in China under the Republic) is not the state going from “respecting intermediate institutions” to “rejecting intermediate institutions” as the libertarian reading of state-family relations would have it, but rather sub-contracting with different units and different calculations. Similarly the family receiving moral guidance and tutelage from the state is not necessarily toxic to family authority—if the state is actually interested in buttressing that authority.

What are some of the implications of this history?

First of all, it helps understand what people are talking about. It is, I think, exactly this sense which is still meant when people, trying to explain why they find the challenge to the traditional constituted family so wrong-headed, say that the family is "the building block" or "foundation" of the country. Not having got the paleo-conservative/social democratic memo that the family and state are inverses -- one can't be a strong institution without the other being weak -- they insist on appealing to real social praxis, rather than the delusions of the political philosophies.

Second of all it points out again how very un-libertarian our Eurasian traditions are. And as Jim has written here, in common law it was taken for granted until the twentieth century that the US state governments had police powers, that is, the right to interfere more or less at will in the life of its members to defend good morals, tax paying capacity, optimal family structure, and so on. In this view, which was the Puritan New England view as David Hackett Fischer emphasized, the state as a sovereign community was, absent any self-limitation, virtually universal in its competence. However, in practice, specific liberties are carved out from this sovereign power and assigned to subcontracting units, such as the family, guild, township, or trading corporation, or what have you. Liberties are thus in the plural, and each one has to be defended either by a specific historical charter, or at least by specific evidence that it existed in the past. Note that it is for this reason that Puritans could join the US constitution. Strong believers in this police power and families as contractors of the state, they could never have joined a constitution that either eliminated these police powers entirely, or assigned them to a non-Congregational government. Only a government that had special liberties above the state (in both senses) could be accepted as the national government.

Thirdly it highlights how many traditional institutions have been misunderstood by a state vs. society framework. This misunderstanding takes the specific form of a what I call “the great inversion” in which institutions first nurtured by the pre-modern state came under attack in the nineteenth and twentieth century, whether by liberals as blocks to the free circulation of resources in the market or by socialists as buttresses of inequality, but then were rewritten by their defenders. This rewriting of history turned them into pre-state, primitive society institutions that had always served as bulwarks of "the people" against the state. The classic case of this is the obshchina or Russian commune, which began as a tax-guarantee institution: the village owed taxes in common and each family was assigned labor to make sure that each family thus contributed to the tax payments. In the 1840s, an idealistic German, looking for remnants of early communes in Europe's countryside reinterpreted this state-generated institution as such a survival of pre-class society. This interpretation was accepted, written in Russian law in 1861, and became the foundation of the populist idea of the Russian peasants being instinctively socialist and communal.***

In American, as well, this happened very early on with gun rights as shown by Joyce Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms started not as an individual right against the state, but a collective sub-contractual obligation of citizens to the state. The English state required all men to participate in its function of maintaining order, training in long bows so the king of England could have enough soldiers in wartime. With the advent of firearms, this obligation to train as a potential soldier of the king was transferred to from long bows to firearms. In the seventeenth century, this hazardous duty was reinterpreted as a valuable right, and in this form was transported to the American colonies. (Although with the New England Puritans, gun ownership was also requirement of community self-defense, not an aspect of individual defiance of the community. Here, as in so many other aspects the New England Puritans typify the phenomenon of "peripheral preservation" where archaic customs and ideas are preserved in remote, provincial areas.)

Finally, the most important implication is for those adhering to the traditional family as valorized by the laws of the Eurasian religions whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian. Despite their differences, I would argue that virtually every feature of the laws -- indeed the very possibility of having a law of family formation and functioning -- was shaped by the family's role as a sub-contractor of the state’s authority. Adherents of these Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian ethics have to recognize that strong family they love became a social reality only in concurrence with state power and through receiving as a sub-contractor a share in the power of the state. The implication is then that the state, in a fairly strong sense, is a precondition for the traditional religious family life. For those adhering to such traditional religious family ethics, the libertarian argument that the state is thus at best a necessary evil runs directly against the historical facts, since those family ethics themselves were first realized in human society as a result of the existence of the state. The predicating of the family's rights on opposition to the state, as in religious libertarianism or paleo-conservatism, is likely to be as ineffectual politically as it is erroneous historically.

*Some sources on this:
New England Puritans: Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer
Württemberg peasants: David Sabean, Production, Property and Family in Neckerhausen, 1700-1870.
Tibetan pastoralists: Rinzin Thargyal, Nomads of Eastern Tibet.

** Maybe more an ideal than a reality. That redemption laws might exist without having much of an anti-market effect is indicated at least by the Neckerhausen evidence as read by Sabean.

***See T.K. Dennison and A.W. Carus, "The Invention of the Russian Rural Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence," The Historical Review 46.3 (2003), pp. 561-82.

Facts (Not Cherry Picked) on Abortion and Social Democracy

Recently John H at the Boar's Head Tavern recommended as "superb" a post on "One Salient Oversight" about abortion. One Salient Oversight's take home message is, abortion rates are lowered by legalizing abortion and then implementing vigorous programs of sex education and unintended pregnancy prevention. Reducing abortion to zero by this process is eminently possible, he claims.

Reducing abortion to zero through education and changes in public attitudes will take time - but it will happen. Every year we can expect abortion rates to drop.

The only thing standing in the way, he argues, is the "hardline stance" of pro-life groups. As a rule with this blogger it is yoked with a criticism of American conservatives, implying that, as the prime pro-life force in the world, American conservatives are responsible for all the abortions in America, and maybe the world as a whole.

Not exactly.

Let's start with the study he references. This is a world wide study of abortion rates here. One Salient Oversight says proudly "I am a fan of measurable outcomes" and so am I. We should be able to examine his handling of evidence and see estimate the quality of his analysis.

He claims:

There are some rather important lessons to learn from this 1999 study. First of all, abortion rates in western countries are much lower than in developing countries.

Actually neither is not the case. The abortion ratio (abortions per 100 pregnancies) in developed countries is 43 per 100 pregnancies, while that in developing countries is 23 per 100 pregnancies. Dramatic difference, eh? Yes, but in the wrong direction.

In fact the reality is neither "Western" nor "developing" is the important category here. As the study itself shows, take Eastern Europe out of "developed" and the developed world aborts 26 per 100 pregnancies, while minus China the developing world aborts 20 out of 100 pregnancies, a much smaller difference, but still going the wrong way. You would have thought that after writing "Countries that have large abortion rates include Bulgaria (51.3), Belarus (67.5), China (26.1), Romania (78.0) and Vietnam (83.3)," One Salient Oversight might have noticed that all of those countries have legal abortion, and as far as I know, none has an noticeably active pro-life movement. (Check the handy-dandy Wikipedia map of abortion laws here.)

It is true that Western Europe as a whole has low abortion ratios, averaging 17 per 100 pregnancies. But what One Salient Oversight doesn't tell you is that Northern Europe (Scandinavia, etc.), hardly a land of conservative yahoos and hard-line pro-lifers, has a rather higher ratio: 23 per 100 pregnancies, not much different from the United States's 25.9. Britishers may congratulate themselves that their abortion debate is less polarized than in the United States, due to the absence of those loathsome pro-lifers, but their abortion ratio isn't much better: a 1996 figure of 20.5 in England and Wales compared to 25.9 in the US (hardly "much lower" pace John H here.) In Southern Europe, the abortion ratio is rather higher than in the United States: 34 per 100 pregnancies.

But many developing regions have abortion ratios just as low, if not lower: 12 to 16 per 100 pregnancies in the regions of Africa, 18 per 100 in South Asia, and 20 per 100 in the Middle East. Eastern Europe, by contrast, has sky-high abortion high rate (65 abortions per 100 pregnancies!)

OK, having thoroughly traduced the evidence to manufacture one conclusion, One Salient Oversight gives us his second one:

Second of all, countries which legalise abortion have lower abortion rates than countries where it is illegal.

Actually the authors of the study, friends of legalizing abortion, yes, but scholars aware of the low rates in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East and the high rates in Eastern Europe make no such claim. Instead they write:

abortion rates are no lower overall in areas where abortion is generally restricted by law (and where many abortions are performed under unsafe conditions) than in areas where abortion is legally permitted . . . Stringent legal restrictions do not guarantee a low abortion rate.

Saying legal prohibitions do not guarantee a low abortion rate is an important conclusion, but it is very different from saying legalizing abortion guarantees a low abortion rate.

Again take a look at the map I linked to above of abortion law regimes. Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia have strict laws and low abortion ratios. Latin America has strict laws and rather higher ratios (30 per 100 in South America, but only 21 per 100 in Central America; the Caribbean's ratio of 35 per 100 is distorted by Cuba, which like most Communist or former Communist countries is abortion heaven: 57 per 100.). Western Europe has a loose regime and a low rates, North America and northern Europe a loose regime and medium rates, East Asia has a loose abortion regime and a high rate (34 out of 100).

This claim that legalizing it means less of it leads to his bizarre deterministic model that if we just implement sex education we will automatically get a low abortion ratio. The key is this: women in these countries [of Western Europe] are better educated in sexual health and prevent conception - and the education has come from publicly funded sources.

The result? Again that jaw-dropping claim: Reducing abortion to zero through education and changes in public attitudes will take time - but it will happen. Every year we can expect abortion rates to drop.

OK, let's find a place where such a program of state-financed education in sexual health (actually what he means is divorcing sex from procreation and family formation) is being tried with the almost unanimous approval of society and little opposition from benighted pro-lifers. How about Sweden? They've been at if for decades now. Let's get a look at those year by year decreasing ratios, and try to catch them before they hit zero (here for the data).

Abortion ratios per 100 pregnancies (rounded to the nearest number):

1985: 24
1986-1989: 25
1990-91: 23
1992: 22
1993-94: 23
1995: 24
1996: 25
1997-2003: 26
2004: 25
2005: 26
2006: 25

So where are the regular year by year dropping abortion rates predicted by One Salient Oversight?

But in the US abortion ratio per 100 pregnancies in 2000 was 24.5, 5% lower than in 1996 a trend in decline of abortions that is continuing (here, nice graphic here) despite the continued existence of conservatives and pro-lifers in this country.

So looking at the source he supposedly used, One Salient Oversight's "superb" post is easily seen to be in fact a fantasy composed of cherry-picked facts taped together with wishful thinking and anti-conservative bile.

Christians who assent to have as a national doctrine taught in the schools to their children that sex has nothing to do with family formation may get a lower abortion rate -- but then again they might not. They might end up like the Swedes with rates higher than in the United States.

But they will probably get one thing along with it: an unsustainably low rate of procreation. (It is worth noting that the great stars in low abortion ratios per 100 pregnancies -- Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland -- have off-the-charts low birthrates as well.)

And finally of course they will certainly, by definition, get another thing: a national consensus that on sex, the second most important practical question of how to live your life (the first being money), the Christian church is and always has been wrong. Unless that is, one wishes to fashion a Christianity which agrees that sex has nothing to do with family formation.

One Salient Oversight's use of statistic recalls how a drunk uses a lamppost, for support, not illumination. But if we want to really use it for illumination, what do the world patterns of abortion suggest?

The most important is that abortion/infanticide is a regular part of human behavior. In this it resembles telling lies, drinking alcohol, and theft, to cite three things with very different legal and religious statuses in world laws and religions.

Whether it's because we are fallen and living in a world of scarcity, or because we inherited it from the great apes (more here), statistically it's a predictable and regular part of human behavior. No large society will ever stamp it out completely; it will never just fade away without real efforts being made to get rid of it. Some, actually most, societies do not wish to make that effort and will live with high abortion rates. (One very clear rule is: no matter where you try it, and whether you stick with it or not, experiments in Communism saddles countries with sky-high rates of abortion.)

To date two different models have been used to eliminate abortion: the "traditional" one of linking sex firmly to procreation, by banning abortion in law, stigmatizing it in social practice, and being thoroughly pro-natal and pro-family: the southern and northern African abortion ratios of 12 per 100 are probably around the lowest you can go by that route.

The other model is the social democratic one of deliberately and firmly decoupling sex and procreation, legalizing abortion, stigmatizing its enemies, and being neutral at best on procreation and family formation. The Western European abortion ratios of around 17 per 100 are probably about as lowest as you can go by that route.

There is no predictable difference between the success of either policy pursued in a real society, in the real messiness of life. Neither route will eliminate abortion. Either route, can probably deeply reduce it. But either route to be successful, must be pursued single-mindedly and with real social conviction. That seems to be a condition, but is certainly not a guarantee, of a low abortion rate.

An additional question for Christians is, is there any future for them and their moral teachings in a society that has firmly and single-mindedly decided to decouple sex from family?

New Research on the Family

I just put on my sidebar (under magazines and their blogs -- well it didn't seem to fit anywhere else) the Howard Center, whose mission is to explain and defend the "natural family." The masthead has "family, religion, and society" which is of course Luther's three hierarchies of church, family, and city.

This site has some great resources (although it does not have a blog -- as yet.) One of more amazing sources of information is the second set of abstracts summarizing new research on the family prepared by Bryce Christensen and Robert W. Patterson. (Here's the first set.)

Let me just note a few of the more fascinating bits of research:

1) What were we talking about a while ago? Social democracy? Oh yes:

"the labor force participation rate among women, and especially among mothers of preschool children, strongly and positively correlated with well-developed welfare states in each of the three components of the index.

Multivariate regressions that controlled for both individual-level and country-level characteristics not only confirmed these correlations, but also found that, all things being equal, women’s odds of employment are almost three times higher, relative to men, in countries at the high end of the welfare scale than in countries at the bottom. The correlations with women’s employment also remained significant in models that controlled for variables whose effects could be mistakenly attributed to the welfare index: GDP, unemployment, the Gini index of income inequality, and attitudes toward gender egalitarianism."

Ironically, however, the researchers (who aren't anti-social democracy at all) found that Scandinavian social democracy, by socializing the family creates pink collar ghettos that actually hinder the employment of women in positions of higher influence (that's the part the researchers don't like).

"large welfare states create and sustain “sheltered labor markets” for women with convenient working terms (day care, maternity leaves, and flexible hours) and where women continue doing what they have historically done: caring for children and families, although now in institutional settings like schools as well as health care and social services, funded by the state."

(BTW, the first round-up summarized research showing that daycare may be more a cause of women joining the labor force than a response to it.)

2) So what does that have to do with religion in Europe? Well take a look at this:

In European countries women working outside the home are less likely to be religious than those not in the paid labor force:

A sociologist and a theologian at Tilberg University in the Netherlands examined data from the European Values Study, a series of surveys conducted in almost all European countries between 1999 and 2000, to explore how characteristics of individuals and countries influence individual religious beliefs and practices. They found, among factors at the individual level, that women in paid employment were significantly less religious (both in terms of belief and practice) than their peers who stayed at home. In fact, the level of religious belief among employed women was more like those of men, who were found to be less religious than women overall. These consistent patterns were found in almost all countries and were statistically significant (p<.001) in multivariate tests.

OK, correlation isn't causation but this is worth thinking about, right?

3) And by the way, isn't the free market in religion in America a great thing that keeps us religious by protecting us from all those dead state churches? Maybe not. The same researchers found:

Looking at the characteristics of countries, the study found that religious pluralism as measured by the Herfindahl Index—meaning the more religions in a country and the more evenly distributed their market shares—as well as the degree to which people trust the churches in their country, were each significantly related to religious belief and to religious practice: The greater the religious diversity of a country, the lower the levels of individual belief and practice; whereas higher levels of public confidence in the church increased each of the two measures.

4) And of course, large numbers of revivalist evangelicals lowers divorce, right? Well, not exactly. Large numbers of "moderate" or "miscellaneous" Protestants, Catholics, and especially Mormons.

Where “moderate” or “miscellaneous” Protestants,* Mormons, or Catholics were more heavily represented relative to other religious categories, that county had significantly fewer divorced persons. Conversely, higher divorce rates were significantly related to lower concentrations of each of these four categories. Moreover, the independent effects of the concentration of these denominational categories were able to explain 49 percent of the variance in the divorced rate with a confidence level of p<.01.

No statistically significant relationships, however, were found between the rate of divorced persons and a higher concentration of each of the remaining three categories: “conservative” Protestants, “liberal” Protestants,* and Jews.

It's actually a well-known fact in sociological circles that conservative revivalistic denominations are not particularly good for marriage -- in fact the researchers were surprised "conservative" Protestants didn't create an increase in divorce. But I have a hunch that a grouping by intensity of conversion experience expected would actually give a better resolution of Protestant churches that the conservative-liberal continuum. It is unfortunately the case that when adults are born again the new person isn't as happy with the old husband or wife. To put it this way: to promote stable marriages churches need to promote two things: 1) the value of marriage; and 2) the value of stability. Liberal Protestants fail at the first; revivalist sects fail at the second.

So one could make a good argument that the United States is more religious than Europe despite the anarchy of revivalistic sects, not because of it. (More tidbits along the lines of how a society-wide social church is actually better for society than passionate revivalism here. Short version: Southern Baptists are good for society only when they act like the state churches they rebelled against.)

5) But of course deep thinkers know that industrialization is what's really responsible for the breakup of the family. It's simplistic to just think that we can have the agricultural family in a post-industrial era. Right? Again, not exactly.

Looking at the effects of the industrialization on family forms,

[Michael J. Rosenfeld] marvels at how American families “weathered the social changes of the Industrial Revolution together.” In fact, because “the Industrial Revolution in the United States … took place during a period of Victorian social retrenchment,” Rosenfeld believes that in many ways “family government” remained quite strong. As a result, “some aspects of American family life remained surprisingly unchanged” during this tempestuous era.

During America’s Industrial Revolution, Rosenfeld points out, “most single young adults … remained in their parents’ homes until they married.” This pattern of coresidence allowed parents to maintain “a significant degree of supervision over their children’s social lives and made it much more difficult for young adults to form the kinds of unions that their parents would not have approved of.” As a consequence of this family governance, “age at first marriage remained constant” during the Industrial Revolution while “extramarital cohabitation remained rare.” As evidence of the remarkably persistent power of family governance, Rosenfeld cites Census data indicating that between 1880 and 1960 the percentage of American men living in nonmarital cohabitation “remained steady at 0.1 percent, one per thousand.”

So what's caused the rise in extramarital cohabitation? Well, it's not complicated:

Central to this analysis is the erosion of “the long-established norm of intergenerational adult coresidence.” Rosenfeld adduces statistics showing that “between 1950 and 2000 the percentage of single adult young women who lived with their parents dropped from 65 to 36 percent.” Not coincidentally, the percentage of young unmarried adults who headed their own households rose—fully 30 percent of young unmarried women and 27 percent of young unmarried men were heading their own households by 1980.

Young adults living with their parents while dating are less likely to move in with a boy or girlfriend, than young adults already in their own apartments. Simple, huh? No "deep-seated causes" no "deep loss of faith" dating from nominalism or the Reformation or industrialization, is needed to explain the rise in extramarital cohabitation: no, it's just that sometime between 1955 and 1965 parents and children stopped thinking it was appropriate for unmarried twenty-somethings to live at home. (And colleges stopped having parietal rules, by the way.)

Anyway, I love this kind of stuff and there's lots more there. Check it out for yourself.

*Moderate Protestant: e.g. AME Zion, American Lutheran Church, United Methodists (19 denominations)
Miscellaneous: e.g. Evangelical Mennonites, Quakers (12 denominations)
Conservative: e.g. Church of the Nazarene, Brethren, LCMS, Salvation Army, Southern Baptist (59 denominations)
Liberal: e.g. ECUSA, PCUSA, UCC (eight denominations)

Some Observations and Hypotheses on the Social Democracy-Secularism Connection

Here's some other interesting ideas on how and why social democracy strengthens secularism:

Mary Eberstadt here suggests that the correlation of fertility and religion goes the opposite way than what we think: it's not that loss of religion causes lower fertility, but that lower fertility causes loss of religion. The piece seems more suggestive than definitive, ef="http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/religdes.htm">university press release:

Reiss said that each of the 16 basic desires outlined in the book influence the psychological appeal of religious behavior. The desires are power, independence, curiosity, acceptance, order, saving, honor, idealism, social contact, family, status, vengeance, romance, eating, physical exercise, and tranquility.

His research is not the usual reductionist stuff (it's also not that incisive, alas) and emphasizes how all sixteen desires interact in religious experience.

Reiss has already done some initial research that suggests the desire for independence is a key psychological desire that separates religious and non-religious people. In a study published in 2000, Reiss found that religious people (the study included mostly Christians) expressed a strong desire for interdependence with others. Those who were not religious, however, showed a stronger need to be self-reliant and independent.

The study also showed that religious people valued honor more than non-religious people, which Reiss said suggests many people embrace religion to show loyalty to parents and ancestors.

Reiss defines "honor" here in a somewhat special way as the idea of living up to one's family, continuing their legacy, and not shaming them.

If he's right, my sense is that most people in Christian societies have little sense of what is psychological drives are strong in the religious.** If asked, my guess is what people would say is that religion fulfills desires for idealism or tranquility (pro) or order or vengeance (con).

OK, put it all together and here's what my general hypothesis:

Religion (or at least the Christian religion) increases when people live in stable, interdependent families that have thick, multi-generational identity, and where good and bad deeds are sanctioned by highly personal punishment and reward. (The best picture of what I mean is here).

How does this relate to social democracy? Here are my detailed hypotheses:

1) Social democracy weakens the sense of family (and other social groups) as lineage from past to future. First a universal pension system makes having children (hence the survival of the group) optional. This is also encouraged by removing sex from procreation -- but I would guess the effect of this is relatively minor, compared to that of universal pensions. Second, by insulating children from the bad decisions of their parents, they remove that sense that my decisions now have consequences for future generations. In other words, egalitarianism, by seeking to eliminating being born in one family rather than another as a generator of life outcomes, comprehensively diminishes the consequences for future generations of one's actions now. Finally, the tendency to replace marriage with cohabitation denies the child a sense of being born into a fixed and named social group (the Joneses, the Smiths, etc.) that is formed and continued by definite ritual incorporation via marriage.

The decoupling of the present generation from the past or future can be seen in the increase in disposal of the bodies of the dead in ways that leave no site for personal remembrance (grave, shrine, columbaria, etc.) which seems to be a prominent feature of European social democratic societies. (That's what Bottum is talking about.)

2) Social democratic values are hostile to shame and guilt as a sanction for bad behavior. The anti-punitive measures focus on the idea of good behavior as rational and bad behavior as resulting not in punishment from some one who loves you, but rather in the impersonal consequences of one's behavior. To put it very crudely, if you've been spanked as a child the concept of sin as an offense against a loving God, rather than a foolish act that results in impersonal consequences, becomes much more plausible. But again social democracy is comprehensively hostile to the concept of punitive sanctions, as opposed to rehabilitation and/or experiencing the automatic consequences of one's unwise actions. As a result sanctions for good or bad actions are systematically depersonalized, i.e. separated from the anger or joy of someone you love.

3) By removing key functions from the family, the social democratic system removes the effect that forces people to live in intense, long-lasting relationships. In more practical terms, household size declines because people can afford to move out. As an adaption to growing up under these conditions, the desire for independence grows and the desire for interdependence declines. Where school and day care are extended to ever greater percentages of childhood, this effect is intensified.

To summarize, all other things being equal*, religion in Christian countries** makes most sense for people who belong to defined and named social groups (families and larger) with a recognized multi-generational past and future, who can bring on themselves and that family intense feelings of honor or guilt/shame by bad or good actions, and who in order to make a living are pushed into intense, permanent, and deeply interdependent relations with the other members of that family.

It makes least sense for people raised as individuals who have individual parents but no sense of a corporate family past and no sense of an obligation to have children in the future, who experience the results of good and bad actions only as an impersonal outworking of actions in the nature of things, and who are financially able to freely move in and out of family groups and live alone or with new persons.

Social democracy devastates religion in Christian countries because it sets about deliberately and systematically to turn a society made of the first type of persons into a society made of the second type of persons.

*Which they almost never are.
**This indirect phrasing is deliberate. Someone might say "Well, Christianity is a relationship, not a religion!" OK, if that's how you define it. But strangely enough, I bet you'll find getting people into your "relationship" will be easier in a society that stimulates "religious" values of interdependence and family honor, than in one that sees these as bad things.

Does Social Democracy Automatically Produce Secularism and Materialism?

Nor is it all that surprising that faith has imploded in most　of the west. Every single 1st world nation that is irreligious shares a set of distinctive attributes. These include handgun control, anti-corporal punishment and anti-bullying policies, rehabilitative rather than punitive incarceration, intensive sex education that emphasizes condom use, reduced socio-economic disparity via tax and welfare systems combined with comprehensive health care, increased leisure time that can be dedicated to family needs and stress reduction, and so forth．

．　．　．　．

The result is plain to see. Not a single advanced democracy that　enjoys benign, progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular religiosity.　They all go material.

This is the argument of Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman on Why the Gods Are Not Winning, and in case you couldn't tell, they think the rise of social democracy and the slow extinction of religion is a good thing. America is religious solely because not being a social democracy (yet), it has a un-benign and unprogressive socio-economic situation. (You can follow the link to get their Hobbesian view of Middle American life.)

Razib has a fine refutation of their secular predictions, entitled Why the Gods Will Not Be Defeated. You can find further discussion from Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat too.

OK, but none of them really deal with the linked assertion of Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, that 1) that there is a correlation between the policies we call social democracy and intense secularism; and 2) that this correlation goes from social democracy to secularism (and not the other way around).

I've have long noticed both of these things. And yes, it seems that chronologically, welfare states come first and then rapid secularization.

From the point of view of someone who actually sees God as important this would seem to be an important point. If this correlation works, then social democracy kills the church, which for a Christian would seem to be reason enough to anathemize social democracy and all its works.

Does anyone else see this correlation? Anyone have explanations? I am particularly interested in the large tribe of Christian social democrats -- do you see this correlation? Can you point to exceptions? How do you explain it? In recommending that countries adopt policies on welfare and law enforcement that are similar to Sweden, what makes you think you are not also inadvertently encouraging the secularism of Sweden?

UPDATE: OK, I think it might help analysis to break down social democracy a bit. In the list presented by Paul and Zuckerman, there are three broad areas:

1) Anti-retributive measures: abolition of the death penalty, handgun control, pressure against corporal punishment in home and school, rehabilitative vs. punitive incarceration, etc.

2) Sexual liberty measures: sex education in schools, encouragement of contraception, legal abortion funded by national health plans, legalization of pornography, removal of any stigma on homosexuality, pressure against fixed sex roles.

3) Welfare state measures: national pension system, public housing, national health care for all citizens, high marginal tax rates on the wealthy, free pre-school and day care, etc.

Note: what Paul and Zuckerman mean by welfare state is particularly measures that remove whole areas of life from private funding for everyone in society. Thus, any measures directly specifically at the poor, such as Medicaid or food stamps, do not really count. (Such measures can be seen as continuous with the long-standing tradition of "poor laws" and hence do not seem new enough to explain the new phenomenon of mass secularization.)

Together these three areas form a group, in that most of the active proponents of one will also support the other. Christian social democrats generally support 1 and 3 most actively, but are more ambivalent about 2.

The US is less social democractic than the European Union on all three. Curiously, though, the sharpest contrast is in no. 1, and the least contrast is in no. 2, with no. 3 in between.