Fading Christian Concerns

In Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians, Disappointing Bishops , today’s “On the Square” article, David Goldman responds to a Catholic bishop’s claim that “Christians one can no longer talk of the land promised to the Jewish people,” because the “promise” was “abolished by the presence of Christ.” But, he notes,

The concerns of Greek Christians will fade before long, for in two or three generations there will be no Greek Christians in the Middle East, nor indeed Christians of any sort in the Middle East. Nor, for that matter, will there be many Greeks; with a fertility rate of only 1.37 children per female, one of the world’s lowest, Greece by mid-century will have a population two-thirds of which exceeds the age of sixty, and very little population at all by the end of the century. In a hundred years, modern Greek will be a dying language.

Israeli Jews, by contrast, have the highest fertility of any first-world population, and not only because of the fecund ultra-Orthodox; fertility among secular Israelis is far above replacement. By 2100, eighteen centuries after Constantine founded the Greek empire, more people will speak Hebrew than Greek.