The myth of high Muslim fertility rates, and the threat they pose

Important to the anti-Muslim narrative is the idea that Muslims reproduce at prodigious rates, and that this poses an existential threat to the West. Specifically, Muslims are reproducing so quickly, that within a generation or two, they will overwhelm the entire Western world.

These predictions are usually muttered by brooding prophets of doom who predict the near-impossibility of Western civilization over triumphing over the implacable foe. This is a common theme at various “race realist” (i.e. racist) web sites and other nationalist web sites that forever repeat myths about American exceptionalism and the U.S. state’s duty to defeat the global threat of the foreign races.

Rick Santorum has more or less built his entire career on the idea that Muslims are the great threat of our age and that all of Western society must be reformed into militant soldiers against Islam. We must “wake up” to the threat, Santorum believes. Watching the anti-Muslim crowd alternate between violent screeching for Holy War and sombre brooding over the grave threat, it is difficult to not think of the anti-communists of the days of yore, like Whittaker Chambers and Frank Meyer, who, being ex-communists, were absolutely convinced that the world was but in the midst of a losing rear-guard action against the superhuman army of Stalinist Soldiers of the Millennium.

It turned out, however, that the communist ubermensch was more interested in blue jeans and Coca Cola than in immanentizing the eschaton.

What sort of apparel and soft drinks motivate Muslims, I can’t say, but it does seem they now have at least one more thing in common with the Westerners: collapsing birth rates. Notes one researcher:

“Of the three major monotheistic religions, all of which encourage fertility, Islam is the one that encourages procreation the least,” he explains. The factor that explains different fertility rates around the world continues to be, not religion, but education levels. In addition, there are other political and sociological factors that differ from country to country, and which the examples below illustrate.
In short, a demographic Homo Islamicus does not exist. And instead of clashing civilizations, the world is headed towards demographic convergence.

Meanwhile, according to John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, the Catholic population in Africa has increased 6,700 percent over the past century. Globally, there are not many more Muslims than the 1.1 billion Catholics, and when we add in other Christians, there are nearly twice as many Christians as Muslims.

But the the purveyors the Holy War will never be satisfied, and just as the anti-communists beat the drum for more and more government, more war, and more police statism, just as William F. Buckley called for a totalitarian bureaucracy in America to defeat communism, so it is for the anti-Muslims. Rick Santorum will not rest until the last American freedom has been extinguished in the name of killing a few more Muslims, but even if he fails, it seems likely that debt, bankruptcy, war, tyranny and societal dysfunction here at home are much bigger threats than a bunch of supposedly hyper-fertile Muslims.