Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series on Natality, a conversation about child-bearing, family life, birth rates, and the presence or absence of children in churches.
Popular culture has only started to catch up to what demographers have known for decades, which is that the world is about to go through a population bottleneck. With the exception of Israel, no developed countries have a birthrate above replacement level. That means North and South America, Europe, and Asia, Australia, and even the Muslim world are all in rapid demographic decline.
It is only in sub-Saharan Africa that the original cause of rapid population growth has not yet been reversed. That cause was the Great Health Transition that brought down child mortality rates and prolonged lifespans first in Europe and North America, and then in the rest of the world. In the last century, therefore, the world’s population quadrupled. But with the availability of contraception, and the cultural revolution that to some extent preceded it, and that was certainly enabled by it, overall deaths are now outpacing births in China and elsewhere. In South Korea, every generation is having fewer than half the kids of the previous generation. All of this can be found in the work of Paul Moreland, especially his latest, No One Left (2024)
What has been common knowledge is that religion is the most influential variable against population decline (see Eric Kaufman, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? [2010]). And not all religions fulfill this role, but only the “Abrahamic,” which are particularly pro-natal. This connection was explored by Philip Jenkins (Faith and Fertility [2020]). What this adds up to confirms what Jenkins has long known: the future of Christian and Muslim religion would seem to be sub-Saharan Africa for now.
Moreland goes so far as to suggest that what we are witnessing will be the biggest demographic change since the demise of North and South American indigenous populations with the arrival of Europeans. The difference now being that the collapsing developed countries are those with the potential to temporarily maintain some of their wealth through mass immigration of more fertile cultures, whose fertility often drops when they come into contact with secular ideologies.
Again, the only bulwark against declining fertility seems to be religion, while in the West, the greatest accelerant of low fertility is secularism. The trends therefore suggest that the religious will indeed inherit the earth — the Amish double their population every 20 years, while conservative evangelicals have one additional child when compared to their secular neighbors.
The main question for high-fertility conservative Christians, therefore, is how they can prevent powerful secular institutions and cultural forces from converting their children to their lower fertility culture to temporarily make up for secularism’s inability to replace itself. For with the easy availability of contraception, the only thing that now encourages high fertility is values, secularism cannot promote on its nihilistic terms. Thus secular infertility is just part of the broader meaning crisis correlated with the (perhaps temporary) end of Christendom.
What will the church look like on the other end of demographic collapse, given that traditional Christianity will probably survive in some form? Will it be the most anti-ecumenical fundamentalists, Latin Mass devotees, and OrthoBros? Perhaps. It seems to me that unless a church has a significant sectarian DNA, it will be difficult to survive. But such sectarianism has to be more than a shrill fundamentalism that potentially alienates its children and ushers them into the arms of secular ideology when they react against their inflexible parents. Besides, the birth rates of Catholics and Orthodox are also under pressure. We need something more than trad sectarianism.
When sectarianism works, to be sure, it instils a healthy cultural pride in its kids. While I entered the Anglican Church as a young man, I had grown up in a family shaped by the ethno-religious ethos of Anabaptism. With 500 years of Mennonite ancestry, my family never had a bit of envy for the dominant culture. We were sure that our family was fine, even better off than any majority group, and that the majority culture had to justify itself to us, not us to the majority.
The attraction of Anglicanism is not that it has this ethos, but rather the opposite. Rarely shrill, it provided a broad framework for different (sometimes shrill) theological sects to muddle along together. Not without its convictions enshrined in the prayer book, it has also allowed free speech and open debate on issues that its theological subcultures would have closed long ago.
As with most intra-Protestant debate, such debate is resolved by external forces like civil war or, now, demographic collapse rather than magisterial decision. One might see this through the lens of providence, Darwinism, or both. My point is that providence, or genetics, has now decided that fertile, sectarian conservatives have de facto won the debate with more liberal religion on sexuality when it regards stable populations.
But does this mean that all aspects of the ecumenical framework of Anglicanism (or any large communion) are “dysgenic” (perhaps the relative of liberalism)? I would argue not. It is not as if the division of warring sects had nothing to do with the rise of secularism in the first place. It helps to have an ecclesial container to control such conflicts.. It is also not clear that, on the other side of population collapse, a religious majority made up of, say, the Amish, knows how to ground a civilization (to say nothing of more bellicose sects).
But let us take this down to the practical level by discussing the Christian family whose fertility will be the real basis of a future Church we cannot now imagine. While the liberal churches have declined fastest because they welcomed the sexual revolution — a key determinant of population collapse — the conservative churches are declining more slowly. I want to argue for the survival-fitness of a non-progressive, quasi-sectarian, yet nonetheless ecumenical form of conservative Christianity. This would be a form of Christianity that adopts what is most useful from the various traditions.
At the top of that list must be marriage partners. As both Mary Harrington (Feminism Against Progress, 2024) and Louis Perry (The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, 2022) have documented, the sexual revolution has decimated our courtship customs and driven apart the sexes. As marriage and children have been pushed further and further off, loneliness, involuntary singleness, and unplanned childlessness have ballooned. As each denominational pool dries up, it behooves parents as well as pastors not only to affirm our counter-revolutionary doctrine of marriage, but to form children in a way that enables them to relate to the major segments of the Church in which there are other potential mates.
On a few occasions, I have seen relationships fall flat because one person was so adamant about antique ecclesial identity politics that he preferred to die alone than learn to live with another Christian. But where else are the virtues of Christian unity to be found than, first, in marriage? One’s lineage, furthermore, ought not end just because of Trent or TULIP or even Chalcedon, for that matter.
Many previously church-dividing issues have been solved. We should genealogically capitalize on the last century’s ecumenical agreements. For example, it is not uncommon here in Egypt for an evangelical to nevertheless baptize his child in the Orthodox Church to leave doors open for an easier intermarriage in the future. There is something to be said for such pragmatism.
It is not that there aren’t practical limits on family life among divided Christians. But today’s fight is for life itself. The admixture of varied Christian pro-natal genealogies and the avoidance of anti-natal ideologies is more important than locking one’s family in an ethno-religious enclave. As a family, build a tribal identity, take pride in one’s ecclesial heritage — honor Luther, Calvin, Menno, Cyril, Aquinas — but strive for a pragmatic catholicity.
It is clear that the sexual revolution has failed disastrously and that the Church will flourish on the other side of population collapse. Will your family and your sect survive? We will all be forced to adapt or die. Will you die on a hill formed in the 16th century? Will you die on a hill formed in the 20th or 21st century? No doubt many will and already have. “As for me and my house,” we will try to be responsible to our Christian ancestors, descendants, and to the whole Church.
Jeff Boldt has a Th.D. from Wycliffe College and serves as a professor of theology at the Alexandria School of Theology, Egypt.
