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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

There are a handful of modern religious and fundamentalist groups that sociologists study for this purpose: Mormons, ultra-orthodox Jews, evangelicals, etc.

The interesting thing about these groups is that they exhibit “carrying limits”: they get to particular community sizes and begin to experience attrition through secularization.

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This does not accord with the Israeli experience. The Haredim have grown enough as a proportion that they shifted the Israeli median voter substantially to the right.

I didn’t say attrition overwhelmed the overall growth pattern. Most evidence suggests that it’s a proportion that increases with overall religious population, with compounding or confounding. factors (e.g. increasing or decreasing participation in a broader secular society).

Haredim “get away” with minimizing participation in many ways, which makes their attrition rates lower than comparable religious groups. But that doesn’t last forever; compare the secularization of Jews in Austro-Hungary in the late 19th century.

Modernization drew a lot of people away from traditional religion. But Hasidim and the Amish etc are "post modern". They have developed various cultural features to "immunize" themselves against the temptations of modernity. There is no reason for this to start failing at any particular point, except perhaps when they become too much of an imposition on the rest of society, which pushes back on them.

> I didn’t say attrition overwhelmed the overall growth pattern.

But that was implied by discussing a carrying _limit_ right?

I suspect this tends to be more sustainable with groups that can provide their own community instead of assimilating into the broader culture.

You are ignoring Islam - the fastest growing religion in the world. And its primarily because of birth rate.

I picked the three examples I was most familiar with!

> The interesting thing about these groups is that they exhibit “carrying limits”: they get to particular community sizes and begin to experience attrition through secularization

I feel like this is true for religious groups in christian-majority countries (or at least traditionally christian countries). I believe that secularization is a christian phenomenon (yes I know it sounds counter-productive), and as such it can only exist in countries with a strong christian tradition.

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