Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The heart of demographic decline: Why ‘pro-family’ policies won’t save us
The heart of demographic decline: Why ‘pro-family’ policies won’t save us
Mar 18, 2025 8:21 PM

In his 2013 book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, Jonathan V. Last warned of the ing demographic disaster,” pointing to America’s recent dip below replacement-level fertility. Today, the rate of decline still shows little sign of slowing, driven by plex “constellation of factors” that range from genuine blessings, to “problems of plenty,” to idols of choice and convenience.

No matter how we parse the patchwork of potential causes, Last concludes that “there is something about modernity itself that tends toward fewer children.” With little help from the state, America has “created its very own One-Child Policy,” he writes. “It is soft and unintentional, the result of accidents of history and thousands of little choices.”

In a recent study, “Car Seats as Contraception,” economists Jordan Nickerson and David H. Solomon confirm such phenomena. Estimating that modern car-seat requirements have prevented “57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017,” the authors note that these requirements have simultaneously deterred many two-child households from growing their families – due to needed vehicle upgrades. According to the study, such laws “led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.”

“Thousands of little choices,” indeed.

Amid the mounting evidence, Ross Douthat has also drawn attention to the issue, contextualizing demographic decline as part of a broader story of Western stagnation and sclerosis. In his latest book, The Decadent Society, he argues that falling birthrates accelerate “the closing of the frontier,” leading to significant moral, social, spiritual, and economic consequences. In a chapter titled “Sterility,” Douthat writes that “as much as individualism is the fruit of growth, wealth, prosperity, and achievement, in our own era it also seems to be the seedbed of stagnation.” Alas, “amid all of our society’s material plenty, one resource is conspicuously scarce. That resource is babies.”

In an essayat Plough, Douthat expands on this argument, making a more consolidated case for why “large families will save humanity” and how we ought to realign our cultural attitudes accordingly. This is not some “eccentric question,” he explains – a concern that is confined to religious radicals and end-times alarmists. Whether a society can continue reproducing is “entangled with any social or economic challenge that you care to name”:

As social scientists have lately begun “discovering,” a low-birthrate society will enjoy lower economic growth; it will e less entrepreneurial, more resistant to innovation, with sclerosis in public and private institutions. It will even e more unequal, as great fortunes are divided between ever smaller sets of heirs.

These are just the immediately measurable effects of a dwindling population. They don’t include the other likely effects: the attenuation of social ties in a world with ever fewer siblings, uncles, cousins; the brittleness of a society where intergenerational bonds can be severed by a single feud or death; the unhappiness of young people in a society slouching toward gerontocracy; the growing isolation of the old.

Families can be over-sentimentalized, imprisoning, exhausting. But they supply goods that few alternative arrangements can hope to match. No public program could have replaced the network of relatives that helped my grandfather live independently until his death – even if, yes, his five children, my mother and aunts and uncles, had often feuded with him and each other over the years. No classroom is likely to supply the education in living intimately with other human beings that my children gain from growing up together – even if the virtue of forbearance is not always perfectly manifest in their interactions.

We now take the human family for granted, either passively neglecting or actively denigrating the blessings of children and childrearing. The allure of individualism-as-actualization is strong, and it manifests across society with supreme subtlety.

As for the causes, Douthat echoes many of Last’s earlier suspicions, pointing to three key drivers of the shift, each of which is a monster of modernity in its own unique way:

First, romantic failure – not just in breakdowns like divorce, but in the alienation of the sexes from one another, the decline of the preliminary steps that lead to children, including not just marriage but sexual intercourse itself. bination of wider forces, the postindustrial economy and the sexual revolution and the identity-deforming aspects of the internet, are pushing the sexes ever more apart.

Second, prosperity, in two ways. One, because a rich society offers more everyday pleasures that are hard to cast aside in the way that parenthood requires. (Nothing gave me more sympathy for the childless voluptuaries of a decadent Europe than the first six months of caring for our firstborn.) Two, because prosperity creates petitive hierarchies, new standards for the “good life,” that status-conscious people respond to by delaying parenthood and having fewer kids.

Finally, secularization – because even if it’s possible e up with a utilitarian case for having kids, the older admonitions of Genesis appear to have the more powerful effect. The mass exceptions to low birthrates are almost always found among the devout, and the big fertility drop-offs in the United States correlate clearly with dips in religious identification.

Yet each is better understood together, representing a “feedback loop” that is profoundly pernicious and self-reinforcing. “The rich society creates incentives to set aside faith’s admonitions,” Douthat explains, “which orients its culture more toward immediate material pleasures, which makes its inhabitants less likely to have children, which weakens munal transmission belt for religious traditions, which pushes the society further along the materialist-individualist path.”

To interrupt such a cycle, Douthat suggests a rather modest proposal, encouraging us to politely persuade other parents to have “just one more” child. This wouldn’t mean arguing for “six or eight or ten, but just one more – the kid who requires a new car seat and maybe a new SUV, the kid they feel like they might be able to afford, the kid you can feel pretty sure they won’t regret.” By starting here – challenging “families on the fence” toward “plausible goals” – we might nudge society back to a minimally sustainable replacement rate.

We could also reinforce these nudges, refreshing our cultural arguments about the blessings of children plementing our rhetoric with any number of “pro-family” policy perks. In doing so, we could provide a proactive push against modern utilitarian impulses, using weapons from a similarly suited armory. “The hope would be that the car-seat economists are right,” Douthat writes, “and that simply by making family more affordable – reducing the cost of childcare or of a parent staying home, reducing the cost of education, reducing the cost of home buying, and so on – you can change both the immediate incentives and the cultural expectations around having kids.”

But while it’s tempting to think about these problems in terms of “tips and tricks” – pairing each with moderating moral ambivalence – Douthat rightly suspects that any real and lasting solution will require far more than shrugging utilitarianism. Wherever tried, our top-down efforts to boost population have largely failed. Many countries have already enacted a series of well-funded, “pro-natalist” and “pro-family” programs. Even where they have succeeded, they have led to results that Douthat admits “are not overwhelming,” with marginal gains that “are fragile and easily swamped.”

Last’s book concludes with much of the same. After surveying the ineffectiveness of a wide range of such approaches – Vladimir Putin’s “Family Contact Day” is my personal favorite – Last concludes that the underlying problems may be tied to something even more insidious than mere consumerist self-interest: the corresponding pull of secularization. Whereas many governments have failed by appealing to the selfishness of adults, those who have succeeded have relied on outward-oriented religious devotion. By offering to personally baptize infants, for example, Patriarch Ilia II managed to increase Georgia’s birth rate by 20%. (Fully 84% of Georgians are part of the Georgian Orthodox Church.)

“There are many perfectly good reasons to have a baby,” Last writes. “(Curiosity, vanity, and naiveté e to mind.) But at the end of the day, there’s only one good reason to go through the trouble a second time: Because you believe, in some sense, that God wants you to.”

Douthat has a similar hunch. For real and lasting change to occur, he writes, we “would need our society to e dramatically unlike itself, ordered to sacrifice rather than consumption, and to eternity rather than what remains of the American Dream. You would need not change on the margins, but transformation – probably religious transformation – at the heart.”

When facing the monsters of modernity, pressed between those “thousands of little choices,” we will need far more than the designs of man. This will require a renewed appreciation for the family, yes. But it will also require a renewed rejection of ourselves, reimagining “vocation” from being an idol of self-actualization to a means of crucifixion. No matter how much we tinker with the material calculus, we still won’t scratch the surface of the underlying allegiances.

For even if and when we see the light – feeling that burning bullseye of truth around the brittle shell of our “hardened modern hearts” – we’ll need an otherworldly obedience, too.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Socialism is dead (Part 2): What’s wrong with the market-based evolution of socialism?
I spent my previous postexplaining that orthodox socialism is effectively dead and what remains is really different variations on societies that effectively accept the market as the standard frame. Here, I would like to explain, in part, why the Bernie Sanders approach to market-based socialism (after the death of socialism) is not the right way forward. As I stated in the previous post, this Americanized “socialism” is definitely of the half-hearted variety. Strong socialism would mean government ownership of the...
What can economics teach us about moral ecology?
In exploring the various connections between morality, theology, and economics, we routinely long for philosophers and theologians who understand economics, just as we crave economists who understand the bigger picture of self-interest and human destiny. That sort cross-disciplinary dialogue and mutual understanding can be beneficial, but for economist Peter Boettke, it can also serve as a distraction. In an article for Faith and Economics, Boettke argues that economics as a scienceoffers plenty of tools for “moral assessment,” and that economists...
Church and politics: Necessary definitions and distinctions
A few weeks ago The Gospel Coalition ran a review of Jonathan Leeman’s book, Why Nations Rage: Rethinking Faith and Politics in a Divided Age. A snip: Leeman’s analysis is guided by a few central convictions. One is represented in Psalm 2 and the title itself. He explains, “History’s greatest political rivalry, it would seem, is between the nations of the earth and the Messiah.” Another guiding insight is that all of life is religious, including politics. This is true...
Dalio’s animated adventure in common grace-infused wisdom
Ray Dalio is a fascinating character. Founder of the“world’s richest and strangest hedge fund,”he’s been dubbed the “Steve Jobs of investing” and “Wall Street’s oddest duck.” He’s currently #26 on Forbes list ofrichest people in Americaand Time magazine once included him on their list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In 2011, Dalio outlined his personal philosophy on life and business in a self-published 123-page PDF called “Principles.” (It was re-released as a book in 2017 and e the#1Amazon...
Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Socialism is dead.
I recently gave a presentation to students about foreign aid in the developing world. I tried to explain that many ing to the conclusion that what is really necessary is to establish conditions suitable for a market-based society. In other words, there must be a transparent administration of justice, the predictable rule of law, private property rights, ease in doing business, a real lack of arbitrariness, etc. Both as I prepared and as I spoke, however, I realized that some...
Liberalism needs natural law
The great British political thinker Edmund Burke regarded what some call “liberalism” today as prehensible, unworkable and unjust in the absence of mitment to natural law.A similar argument can be made in our own time, says Acton research director Samuel Gregg: Without natural law foundations, for instance, how can we determine what is and isn’t a right other than appeals to raw power or utility, neither of which can provide a principled case for rights? Or, on what other basis...
Justice Scalia explains why the ‘living Constitution’ is a threat to America
A majority of Americans—55 percent—now say the U.S. Supreme Court should base its rulings on what the Constitution “means in current times,” while only 41 percent say rulings should be based on what it “meant as originally written,” according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. Not surprisingly, the divide is mostly along partisan lines. According to Pew, nearly eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (78 percent) now say rulings should be based on the Constitution’s meaning in current...
The (just) price of salt (and cancer drugs)
A recent episode of the very fine podcast EconTalk reminded me of one of the more remarkable episodes during my time here at the Acton Institute involving our internship program. The EconTalk episode is about the price of cancer drugs, and the various factors that go into the often astronomical prices of the latest cancer-fighting drugs. These can run up to an in excess of $300,000 per year. A question implicit in the discussion is whether such high costs are...
How geography affects economic growth
Note: This is post #78 in a weekly video series on basic economics. You could fit most of the U.S., China, India, and a lot of Europe, into Africa. But if pare Africa to Europe, Europe has two to three times the length of coastline that Africa. Why does this matter? As this video by Marginal Revolution University explains, geography can have profound effects on a nation’s economic growth. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d...
The miracle apple: Co-creative lessons from the fall of the Red Delicious
In the Age of Information, much of our work now takes place in the realm of the “intangible”—creating and trading products and services that can feel somewhat obscure or abstract. Even still, in our technological, data-driven world, we should remember that we are cooperating withnatureandco-creating with our Creator. From the social-media giants to the sawmills, from the blockchain banks to the barbershops, we are using our God-given intellect and creativity to transform a mix of matter and information into something...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved