Religion and the Decline of Fertility in the Western World (review)

What role did religion play in the fertility decline during the last two centuries? In eleven chapters, scholars from such different disciplines as history, sociology, geography, anthropology, economics, and demography try to provide an answer. The analytical tools are similar throughout the articles. The authors make use of micro-level data on family and family size, and they use comparable statistical methods suited for these kinds of data. Their chapters share a clear theoretical approach. The introduction presents an overview of the research on the fertility decline during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and discusses issues surrounding the European Fertility Project, in which cultural influences were often ignored in favor of different socioeconomic hypotheses and explanations.

In the first chapter, Katherine A. Lynch focuses on different theoretical and analytical approaches to religious beliefs during the first period of fertility transition. Lynch discusses the dichotomy between traditional and modern forms of birth control within marriage. Her results show that families practiced birth control before the modernization process started. The other chapters compare the demographic behavior within and without different religious groups—Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Protestants—which varied according to historical settings and socioeconomic circumstances.

According to Jona Schellekens and van Poppel in their study of The Hague, Jews were not forerunners in the marital-fertility transition. Calvin Goldschieder's essay on modern Israel reveals that Jews and Christian Arabs had lower fertility levels than Israeli Muslims. Derosas finds that Jews who lived outside the Venetian ghetto during the mid-nineteenth century adopted birth control, whereas Jews living in the ghetto had higher fertility than the Catholic majority. On the basis of life-course data, Jan Kok and Jan van Bavel show that the reduction of family size first occurred among liberal Protestants in the Netherlands, and a similar pattern is evident in Kevin McQuillan's study of Alsace.

Ernest Benz challenges the traditional view that orthodox Roman Catholicism was an obstacle to contraception. Using local genealogies, he concludes that the impact of religion on fertility goes beyond religious doctrines. Anne-Françoise Praz's study of two cantons in Switzerland indicates that Protestants, because of increasing schooling costs, started to practice birth control and that Catholics avoided educational costs by not letting their daughters attend school. Patricia Thornton and Sherry Olson report that the fertility decline in nineteenth-century Canada differed between Catholics and Protestants, arguing that language and origin must be included in the analysis. Based on nominal data, Danielle Gauvreau shows that Catholics of French origin were less affected by the fertility decline than Catholics of Irish origin. David Kertzer summarizes the preceding chapters. He argues that the role of religion on reproductive behavior and the family contributes new insights to the study of demography.