The devout tend to have more children

LONDON - The devout will spread the “believers’ gene” and help religion grow by leaps and bounds by having more children.

Robert Rowthorn, economics professor at Cambridge University, Britain, quoted from studies showing that more religious people tended to have more children.

“The more devout people are, the more children they are likely to have,” he said.

Some religious sects had fertility rates three or four times the general population, Rowthorn noted, reports the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

He cited a worldwide study showing that the more religious had more children, according to the Telegraph.

The World Values Survey, covering 82 nations from 1981 to 2004, found that adults attending religious services more than once a week had 2.5 children on an average; while those who went once a month had two and those who never attended had 1.67.

If people in these groups only married within them then the “ultra-high fertility groups would rapidly outgrow the rest of the population and soon become a majority”, he said.

For example, the Amish in the US had grown from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010, and were forecast to increase to 44 million by 2150 if past trends continued.

In practice, however, many tended to leave these sects or marry outside them and consequently have less children than they might have done.

Such “defections” would “slow down the spread of the religiosity gene” but not stop it, he reasoned.