Well, secular humanism is at least as old as Ingersoll, and even its very modern existentialist variant is arguably already four generations old. Kooks and quacks like those you list have been around for far longer than that; in order to know whether they are a problem for secularization we would need to know whether their frequency or influence is actually increasing as secularization proceeds, which is a very hard thing to measure.
As for ultra-traditionalist religious communities, I would say they face at least as big a sustainability problem: namely, how to be at once insular enough to resist the allure of secularization and productive enough to thrive without relying on massive subsidies from the secular world, subsidies which that secular world may be inclined to withdraw if the traditionalists become real competitors. The Haredi are explicitly subsidy dependent, for example, and I would say the Amish are implicitly so. On the other side of the dilemma, the commerce-friendly worldliness that has made the Mormons so successful has also liberalized their mores considerably and brought their TFR down to not much over 2 with no sign of leveling off. Between that dilemma and the likely technological conquest of aging this century, I am not so worried about trads inheriting the earth.
Well, secular humanism is at least as old as Ingersoll, and even its very modern existentialist variant is arguably already four generations old. Kooks and quacks like those you list have been around for far longer than that; in order to know whether they are a problem for secularization we would need to know whether their frequency or influence is actually increasing as secularization proceeds, which is a very hard thing to measure.
As for ultra-traditionalist religious communities, I would say they face at least as big a sustainability problem: namely, how to be at once insular enough to resist the allure of secularization and productive enough to thrive without relying on massive subsidies from the secular world, subsidies which that secular world may be inclined to withdraw if the traditionalists become real competitors. The Haredi are explicitly subsidy dependent, for example, and I would say the Amish are implicitly so. On the other side of the dilemma, the commerce-friendly worldliness that has made the Mormons so successful has also liberalized their mores considerably and brought their TFR down to not much over 2 with no sign of leveling off. Between that dilemma and the likely technological conquest of aging this century, I am not so worried about trads inheriting the earth.
brilliant as usual