Can Spiking Birth Rates Promote Religious Fundamentalism?br Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Festival of Dangerous Ideasbr Eric Kaufmann is a political scientist and author of the recently published Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?.With all the current talk about the revival of religion, political scientist Eric Kaufmann takes a look at the statistics and muses that if demography is any guide, the world over the next half century will become much more religious and much more conservative.