Thursday, October 24, 2024

Part I

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Can Government Raise the Birth Rate? The Global Birthrates Are Crashing And It’s Proving Increasingly Difficult to Fix the Problem

Well, all around the world, the birth rates tend to be falling. Nation by nation, birth rates are going down. We already know at this point that the birth rate has fallen to catastrophic non-replacement rates in places such as South Korea, but increasingly also in other nations such as Italy. But quite frankly, you look at nations including the United States, and we are in a birth rate freefall, and that spells big trouble. And we need to take a closer look at what this means.

And we’re thinking about this, of course, as most people in the United States are thinking about the election to come. There’s plenty to talk about there. But the point is we need to talk about this because this is by definition an even more basic issue than who will be the next president of the United States. In Christian worldview terms, we are talking here about creation order itself. That is to say these are issues that take us right back to Genesis 1. If this takes us back to Genesis 1, it’s of fundamental importance.

But it’s also important to recognize that how people respond to this story, whether or not even, say, major media consider it a story, this turns out to be a part of the story. So let me tell you that in recent days, two successive days, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both ran major front page articles. So The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, were talking media establishment. Both of those papers within two days ran front page articles on the failure of government policies intended to raise the birth rate to actually do so.

So we start with The New York Times because it was one day before the Wall Street Journal, the Times headline, “Policies to Raise Fertility Rates Haven’t Produced Baby Booms.” The next day, Wall Street Journal, “Countries Fail to Reverse Baby Bust, the subhead, Years-long Efforts to Encourage Bigger Families Haven’t Found Success.”

Okay, so behind both of these front page articles is an agreement in research, a consensus among researchers that government policies have not yet proved to be very effective in turning back a falling birth rate. Now, I’m going to make the argument right now that the reason that is so, or at least appears to be so for now, is because we are talking about issues that are pre-political. So by the time you get to government policies, well, as The New York Times acknowledges, government policy can lower a birth rate, it’s very difficult for government policies to cause the birth rate to rise.

Okay. So there’s so many issues that attend to this. They’re connected to this. We need to turn to them. There are few issues that are so explosive with worldview potential. Both of these major front page articles, the first in The New York Times, more editorially liberal than the Wall Street Journal, more editorially conservative, both of them come with the major message that governments have been thus far unable, even when they have tried, to get their citizens to raise the birth rate. And that means, in particular, the big issue here, and this is a subtext in all of this of course, for Christians it’s more than a subtext, the big issue here is that the main issue is what are heterosexual married couples doing? That’s the big question. And the answer is they’re having fewer children.

But there’s also a question before that. How many people aren’t marrying at all? How many people aren’t even entering into a situation? I’m talking among those who still understand marriage rightly to be the union of a man and a woman. The problem turns out to be inside heterosexual married couples in these societies who are having fewer children. And it is also the delay of marriage, or the avoidance of marriage, and the attendant avoidance of children altogether that are turning out to be major factors as you look at these rapidly and devastatingly falling birth rates.

Now, I think some listeners are probably saying, “Now, wait just a minute. Wait just a minute. For, say, the last 50 or 60 years, we have been subjected to government warnings about a population explosion. And yet, as I’ve been talking about for decades now, that was largely an illusion, a misrepresentation, and it was driven by an anti-humanist agenda that shows a basic rejection of Christian understandings of how the family is to exist, how children are a gift. You could just go down the list.

Now, is it true that there were warning signs back in the 1960s and the ’70s about too many mouths and not enough food? Yes, there were warning signs. But by the time we as humanity reached the 21st century, it was very, very clear that the problem was not enough food. It was maldistribution of food. But the other big reality, the looming reality is what wasn’t seen at the time it was happening, and that is a falling birth rate. And so even as we’ve not yet reached the peak population of the world that’s going to come somewhere near it is projected this century, the problem is that already the big issues of falling birth rate and that falling birth rate can be devastating.

Now, here’s where a lot of people don’t want to face the question, particularly those on the Left. Those who are more secular, those who are more progressive, more ideologically inclined to the left, they think a lower birth rate is just great. They also think that it’s something of a right-wing plot, a Christian nationalist plot to suggest the big problem are falling birth rates that need to be reversed. But that’s going to be a really hard argument to carry out when you see that some of the most governments on earth are, for example, the communist government, the government under the control of the Communist Party in China.

And you’re talking about many people all over the world, and these are certainly not Christian nationalists, who are quite concerned about the fact that someone is going to have to find a way to perpetuate their economy. Someone’s going to have to find the workers. Someone’s going to have to figure out who’s going to take care of all the people in the nursing homes. Because in some of these societies, you already have the crossing of two crucial lines. One is the number of babies being born, and that’s the number of children in the society. And the other line that is now crossed going not down but up, is the number of retirees and people who are living longer. And as they’re exiting the workplace, there aren’t going to be enough young people to take their jobs or take their place.

And you know what? You can talk all you want about automation and the digital age and artificial intelligence, but the fact is it takes human beings to make society work. And when you don’t have enough human beings to make society work, well, here’s a little hint, your society doesn’t work.

Okay. So just understand that these two front page news stories were in arguably two of the, say, three or four most influential news sources in the entire English-speaking world, period. So we’re talking about The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. These two articles separated only by about 24 hours, both of them on the front page of the print edition crying out an emergency. But at the same time, the responses to this are going to turn out to be very interesting.

But before we turn to the responses, let’s just look at how this news story is contextualized and explained in these two very different newspapers. Chelsea Delaney, the Wall Street Journal reports, “Birth rates have been falling across the developed world since the 1960s, but the decline hit Europe harder and faster than demographers expected, a foreshadowing of the sudden drop in the US fertility rate in recent years.” That’s a well-written sentence. It tells us that demographers, those who studied demography and population trends, they knew that a decline in the population was coming, a decline in the birth rate was on the horizon, but they underestimated significantly how fast it was going to come. And that’s not just true in Europe. As it points out, it turned out also to be true in the United States.

Reporter Motoko Rich, writing the piece for the front page of The New York Times, starts the article this way, “In 1989, Japan seemed to be an unstoppable economic superpower. Its companies were overtaking competitors and gobbling up American icons like Rockefeller Center. But inside the country, the government had identified a looming slow motion crisis. Their fertility rate had fallen to a record low. Policymakers called it the 1.57 shock,” That’s a birth rate of 1.57, “citing the projected average number of children that women would have over their childbearing years.” The article continues. “If births continued to decline, they warned, the consequences would be disastrous. Taxes would rise, or social security coffers would shrink. Japanese children would lack sufficient peer interaction. Society would lose its vitality. As the supply of young workers dwindle, it was time to act.” That was the 1990s. The shock was 1.57. Well, now Japan would look back to that as the good old days.

Since that time, Japan’s fertility rate has dropped to 1.2. And I’ve mentioned Japan’s crisis before because that’s the nation that is talking about trying to develop robot technology to take care of the aged in nursing homes. Just think of that. It sounds like a nightmare science fiction scenario, but that’s what happens when a society stops having babies.

The Wall Street Journal points out that this is affecting so many countries around the world. And as a matter of fact, it’s affecting most of the world. The only real exceptions to this right now are outliers such as some African nations, but the birth rates in those nations are also falling fast as well.

The Wall Street Journal’s front page article says this, “Reversing the decline in birth rates has become a national priority among governments worldwide, including in China and Russia where Vladimir Putin declared 2024 the year of the family. In the US, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have pledged to rethink the US’s family policies. Harris wants to offer a $6,000 baby bonus. Trump has floated free in vitro fertilization and tax deductions for parents.”

Well, I want to take a little closer look, a little deeper dive in The New York Times article because in worldview significance, there’s just a lot here. For example, one woman was cited as saying that she woke up and she was 28 years old, “Even though there are now no practical barriers, I realized I don’t want children.”

Later, a 28-year-old woman writing from Hungary where the government has been pressing a pro natalist, that is a pro baby policy, that included, by the way, access to loans to buy a house, this woman said, “If we were to say we’ll have two kids, we could basically buy a new house tomorrow. But morally,” she said, “I would not feel right having brought a life into this world to buy a house.” Well, she’s making a statement saying she wouldn’t feel right to bring children into the world to have a house. But what about having a house in order to bring children into the world? You know what I mean? In order to have a home to establish an abode for a family. You’ll notice how the whole logic of this highly secularized, increasingly morally confused world is just turned upside down. This woman says this as if she’s making a moral point not to have babies.

Later in the article, a 35-year-old woman also in Hungary pressed back on the government’s proposal saying, “It’s not our duty as Hungarian women to keep the nation alive.” All right, I circled that one in red. That’s one of those statements that just reveals exactly what we’re facing here. An anti-natalist philosophy is a godless philosophy, and that’s going to aggravate some people. I intend it to.

An anti-natalist worldview, a worldview against having babies is the direct contradiction of and disobedience of the first command God gave to human beings, which is to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill the earth. It’s not as if the issue is not clear in Scripture. In Scripture, anti-natalism is something associated with murderous and idolatrous kings.

So again, to get to the bottom line, these two front page articles, they’re not a coincidence and they are of great worldview and moral significance, but they are really dealing with government policies and whether or not they work trying to raise the birth rate. But this is where we need to bring in a couple of other issues. And one of them is the fact that, as I said, it has turned out that governments can depress the birth rate and that’s horrible enough. But it turns out, on the other hand, they really seem not to have many policy tools at their disposal to try to encourage people who otherwise wouldn’t have children to decide to have children.

And when you’re thinking about the negative policies, there is no policy that was more horrifying than the policy of the Communist party and the communist regime in China beginning in the 1970s. It was a one child only policy, and it led to repression, it led to abortion, it led to infanticide, it led to forced abortion. And the Chinese government was concerned, and by the way, they were being influenced by some liberal academics in the United States. That’s not the sole source, but you had liberal academics in big foundations that were pressing this population explosion warning upon China. But it turns out right now, the big problem in China is not too many people, but too few. And in particular, they’re going to end up with a lot of old people and not enough young people. And among the threats to the future of China is the threat of this catastrophically declining birthrate.

Now, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal came back just a matter of a few days ago, and over the weekend made the declaration that China’s one child economic disaster is directly traceable to the repressive and communist regime that is in power in China. The editors write, “For decades, Beijing enforced a one child policy that was ghastly in the way only an authoritarian regime can achieve. The human cost was incalculable, particularly on Chinese parents subject to forced abortions or sterilizations. The social consequences have been catastrophic as sex selection abortions skewed the population in favor of males and successive generations of Chinese have grown up without siblings, aunts or uncles.” The editors then summarize, “Communist party leaders will never admit to any of that, but even they recognize the policy has been an economic disaster.”

Now, here’s the big worldview point. If you defy creation order, guess what? You’re going to achieve disaster. That’s exactly what you’re going to do. If you deny creation order, then you are going to basically destroy your own civilization, and that’s what we see. But you say, “Well, I can understand that you can trace this anti-natalism in China to the repressive policies of a communist regime, but you’re talking about devastatingly low birth rates in other places such as Italy and also big-time problems coming in the United States.” You can’t blame that on a totalitarian communist regime. No, I tell you what you can blame that on. It is the giant cultural shifts towards personal autonomy, sexual liberty as it was defined, and away from children and away from the family and away from husbands and wives and their children and towards personal autonomy, personal liberty, and the celebration of lifestyle liberalism in this country.

Part II

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Actually, More Babies IS the Solution to Falling Birthrates: A Look at a Recent Feminist Evasion

And it just so happens that well time for our consideration today is an article that appeared at The New York Times just yesterday, and it’s basically traceable to Jessica Grose, who is a reporter and columnist there at The New York Times. The headline is this, “More Babies Aren’t the Only Solution to Falling Birth Rates.” Now, let me just state, when you do see words like that in a row, you need to step back for a moment and say, “Wait just a minute. If the problem is falling birth rates, how can more babies not be the only answer to that?” And it’s because this is basically all about a moral and cultural evasion of the issue. But boy, is it revealing.

Okay, so Jessica Grose identifies herself in a podcast as an opinion writer at The New York Times. She says, “I cover family, religion, and the way we live now.” Well, okay. Well, she then goes on to talk about the birth rate falling. And then she says this, as the birth rate has been falling, “this is a result of a lot of positive trends.”

Okay, I know exactly where this is going, but it’s really important that we trace where this is going. And she says, “Okay, what are the positive trends that she’s claiming have resulted in a falling birth rate?” She says, “Part of it is that people are becoming more educated. The more educated people become, the more they are going to delay child bearing, child-rearing, and for that matter having children at all. And you also see,” as she writes, “part of that trend is also in the United States a massive decline in teen pregnancies.” Okay. So we could agree that pregnancy, outside of marriage, and in particular when it comes to teenagers, that is not a good thing. But you know what? That doesn’t explain the majority of the missing births.

But then she goes on to say, another one of the positive trends that she cites is the contraceptive revolution. Now, again, this is where Christians have to understand that if we’re going to think in biblical terms, we can’t think the way the world thinks. And we’ll be back to this issue pretty soon on The Briefing because of other big time developments in the society. But I’m going to have at this point delay talking about the contraception and birth control issue and just stick pretty much with the birth rate. 

But the Jessica Grose argument is really fascinating, and she writes, celebrating, “And now we live in a society where you can plan your reproductive life. And that is why there are very few people, men or women who want to have five or six kids. There are definitely still people who do, and God bless them, but it is not a majority desire.” She then goes on to cite other things. “There are people who are worried about financial stability.” She says this, “My biggest advice, if you are still really worried about the birth rate, is don’t be. I think there’s some people who are genuinely worried about programs like social security and the solvency of the American economic system, but I think there’s some people who just want to control women and their bodies and think they should be wives and mothers first and foremost.”

Okay. Okay. Big explosion. Bomb just goes off. Alarms ringing everywhere. In worldview terms, we just got handed the treasury. Here you have a woman representing modern autonomy, modern secular worldviews, modern liberal and ideological developments, modern anti-natalism, feminism. You just go down the list. And she says that if someone’s concerned about the birth rate, it could be they’re worried about social security and the solvency of the American economic system as if those are big concerns. But she goes on to say, “I think the big thing behind this is those, some people, probably men who ‘just want to control women and their bodies and think that they should be wives and mothers first and foremost’.”

Wow. So Jessica Grose continues, “So I think instead of simply pressuring people to have children or to have more children, it would be better if we started thinking more broadly about how to restructure society for a birth rate that may be slightly below replacement going forward.” Okay, let’s just take that sentence at face value. It basically means let’s go ahead and draw the curtain down. Let’s just do it slowly. She also says, “There’s a well-established pattern that when both income and quality of life go up, societies go from lots of births and lots of deaths to fewer births and longer life expectancies. And that means for a while we’re going to have more elderly than children.”

Okay. Okay. Wait just a minute. Wait just a minute. For a while, we’re going to have more elderly people than children. How in the world do you turn that around if it’s not having more children? Well, you can do the math. It means you have fewer elderly people. How’s that for a threat? The big point made by Jessica Grose is that society has progressed in education and women’s liberation and personal autonomy. We’ve grown beyond the idea that there’s a moral responsibility to be married and to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and to have a mom and a dad and to have babies. We’ve outgrown that. We are beyond that. We have progressed far transcending that. And thus she writes, “We do not have to rewind the clock to 1990. We don’t want to go backwards and we don’t have to.”

Okay. If you don’t see the worldview significance of this issue, I don’t know how to make it any more plain. But it goes to something else, and this is something very easy for Christians to remember. The more secular a society is, the fewer babies it has. The more religious a society is, in the main, and this means in almost every case, the more babies that society has in terms of an annual birth rate. And we understand there’s a reason for that. And there’s a reason why I put it just the way I put it. I said more religious. I’m not just talking about Christians here. I’m saying that the more religious a society is, the more babies it has because even when you have, say, ancient forms of paganism, they at least had to make some acknowledgement of creation order, otherwise they died out. So it turns out that modern secularists are, in this sense, even more rejecting of creation order than the ancient pagans. And wow, that’s really saying something.

Part III

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The More Secular the Society, the Lower the Birth Rate, and It’s Not a Coincidence: Theological Conviction is Key to Human Flourishing

In opportunities ahead, we’re going to be taking a closer look at this because there’s really no bigger issue we could face than the issue of life. And you understand how this is all tied together. You take the abortion issue, the sanctity of life issue, the birthrate issue, you see a commonality here. An awful lot of the most important issues confronting our culture today, even that have become matter for political debate in the presidential campaign today, they come back to whether or not we have babies. And I do think it’s very politically significant that on both sides of the political aisle, both party nominees and their running mates, have come out in favor of some kind of proposal that would put government even more in favor of incentivizing American couples having children rather than not having them.

The fact that that has all the sudden exploded into the 2024 presidential race tells you something, because it wasn’t there just four years ago in 2000. It wasn’t really there at all. The fact that it’s now a matter of national priority and both candidates, both nominees are making it a part of their proposals that really does tell you something.

But that’s where these two front page articles in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times come back. They point out the government policies alone aren’t going to solve this problem. Tax rebates, incentivize loans, financial benefits to couples, they’re not producing the turnaround in the falling birth rate that have been hoped for. And that’s where Christians have to come back and say, “That’s because the problem is more basic. The problem is more basic than just even money.” And in our society, when you find an issue more basic than money, you better know that’s an important issue.

So we’ll be talking more about this. In the meantime, God bless those of you who are having babies and raising them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And we should all as Christians and in our churches, be honoring those who are having babies and thanking God for all of those babies, and doing everything we can to prioritize the civilizational fundamental of honoring those who have babies. How much more so in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ?