You know as Christians, we understand that numbers matter, but not all numbers matter equally, at least not in terms of financial reports and statistical reports, even trends, even demographic trends having to do with population. They’re not all equally meaningful. But I think as Christians, we do understand that if we’re talking about a very big news story when it comes to a falling human birth rate, that’s a big story. As a matter of fact, for Christians, it almost can’t be a much bigger story. Here we’re talking just in the framework of creation order. We’re talking about Genesis 1, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” Now we’re talking about human beings evidently en masse just as a global reality basically deciding not to do that anymore.

Now, let me just give you one statistic and one number. This is a number that you can keep very much in mind. The number is zero. In many countries right now, the largest number of women are having zero babies in their lifetime. Zero. That’s a number I think we can understand. Now, as you’re talking about other numbers, what you have is a falling birth rate and the big story is that we’ve learned several things over the course of the last several years that weren’t expected in this at all. 

Number one, there had been a pattern going all the way back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution in which you had the changes in the economy plus the basic rise in human health, which meant that fewer children died in terms of their childhood years. The reality is that there had been expected as a natural development of all these things, a recalibration of the birth rate. And so when you think about the elimination of some of the threats to life in early childhood that were so present in previous generations, you could have a fall in the birth rate without having a fall in the population. That was at least hypothetically possible, simply because more children are living longer into adulthood where they can marry and reproduce themselves. But now we’re talking about another calibration that is necessary. And let me just get right to the shocking part. The shocking part is that this really wasn’t expected. And as a matter of fact, there were some moments of what were called human transition over the course of say the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century in which it was clear there was going to be some recalibration of all these things, but it was basically in the 21st century.

So we’re talking about just in the last two decades and slightly more. We’re talking about a massive change, a massive decrease in the human birth rate. But not only that, we’re talking about the last decade making this abundantly clear. Okay. So almost immediately people are saying, “Well, is this true for say the most wealthy countries in the world? Is this true for Western Europe and the United States, Scandinavia and nations like Australia and New Zealand and Japan?” And the answer is yes, it’s happening there. As a matter of fact though, it’s not happening at the same way at the same rate everywhere. And so yes, there are differences country by country and even in terms of some civilizational patterns, there are differences in Africa right now, for example. The birth rate is higher for now but falling fast. 

But the reality is that this isn’t as predictable as you might think as you’re looking at correlations. There are some very interesting patterns, but the reality is that you take a nation or let’s just take an area, an area, a region like Scandinavia. The birth rate began falling decades ago and it is basically now at very, very low levels. You have political and economic questions that come up. For example, some people more or less on the cultural Left have been making the argument that this is really all about economics. People, and here’s the expression you’ll often hear, can’t afford to have children. And yet as you look at the patterns, it turns out that the more money people have, in many cases, the fewer children they have, which is to say that the economic pattern, it’s not irrelevant. It’s not a stupid answer, but it clearly is not by any means an adequate answer. There’s a much deeper issue here. And by the way, Christians would know if you’re talking about something at this level of moral importance, there’s a spiritual issue involved and at least a part of the reality is also the grave opportunity of self-deception.

Okay, but we’re also looking at the fact that for a good number of years people said, “Well, these trends are accelerating in places like Europe, but not in the United States. And yet now we know this is happening in the United States as well.” So let’s just try to step back for a moment and take a look at what we’re seeing globally. John Burn-Murdoch has done a really important piece for the Financial Times of London and he presented it as a video and yet it’s also available as an article. The statistics in it are really interesting, but what makes this particularly of importance is the fact that it says out loud some of what many have come to conclude is the real problem here. It’s not so much the decision to have fewer babies, it’s fewer people getting married in the first place, fewer people even coupling, to use a non-marital term in the first place.

All right. So he begins by saying this, “From the 1980s to the early 2000s, birth rate in high and middle income countries were stable or at least stabilizing, but over the last 10 to 15 years across a wide range of regions, cultures and levels of economic development, they’ve gone into steep decline. In more than two thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman is now below the replacement rate of 2.1.” So let’s just stop for a moment. And more than two thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the population birth rate is now below the level of sustainability. Then this: “In 66 countries, the average is closer to one than two roughly 2.12 or something close to that is what’s absolutely necessary for just replacement, demographic stability in terms of birth rate and death rate.” But then he goes on and says, “In some, the most common number of children born to each woman is now zero.”

Okay. So let’s look however at that sentence because we don’t want to read it wrongly. And that’s one of the things that even in conversation, I’ve heard people describe that somewhat inaccurately. That is not the statement that the average woman is having zero. It’s rather that if you just look at a graph, the largest number of women on one number is the number zero. Now, I am not by any means saying that’s not a horribly significant factor. I draw attention to it myself. It is just to say that we’re not talking about the largest number of women. We’re talking about the largest number who landed on one number. Well, here’s the really horrible thing, that most common one number is zero. And you can just look at this and understand that it is almost a sure thing that at no previous point in the history of humanity was this real or even possible, maybe even imaginable.

So people were looking and saying, a lot of this is economic, but then listen to this. “In 2023, Mexico’s birth rate fell below that of the U.S. for the first time, followed quickly by Brazil, Tunisia, Iran, and Sri Lanka.” Okay, hold on. Wow. A lot of landmines there. So number one, we’re talking about 2023, so that’s just three years ago. Mexico’s birth rate fell below that of the U.S. okay? So that tells you that it’s not just an economic issue, not just in countries like the United States and Western Europe, it’s also in other countries like Mexico, but then there were other countries mentioned also hitting that tripwire in 2023. Brazil, okay, that makes sense. That’s even fairly close to Mexico. Tunisia, okay, now we’re crossing the ocean and Sri Lanka, and then we’re crossing cultures there too. And then Iran. 

Now wait just a minute. Wait just a minute. The birth rate has fallen that much in Iran and this is substantiated by the evidence. What you have seen most recently in Iran is the bottom falling out demographically. The birth rate has fallen beneath that of the United States. Okay, all right. All right. So what is so astounding there? Well, what’s astounding there is the fact that when you’re talking about Iran, you’re talking about the Islamic Republic of Iran. And when you are talking about theologies that are very clear on matters of sexuality and family, you’d have to say Islam is very clear even to the point of having in many cases a form of polygamy. But when you’re talking about the birth rate falling there and you’re looking at the Muslim goal basically of having an expanding population, with an expanding influence and you’re looking at the reality that more traditional forms of religion, I’ll just put it that way, that’s just the way sociologists would put it.

The more conservative forms of religious belief tend to produce higher birth rates, sometimes the world’s highest birth rates. Well, Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran now has a fast decreasing, fast falling birth rate. That tells you that this is really a global story. All right now there’s something else that comes out in this and I’m going to bring in data from a lot of other studies and a lot of other centers in order to help us to see this more clearly. Later in this Financial Times report, we hear, “Another important part of the story is that in many cases, birth rates are falling despite not because of people’s desires. On average, young men and women still report wanting around two children, even in South Korea where most women now have zero, but those headline numbers mask a lot of variation below the surface in several countries a rising share of young people, especially women, young women, now say they don’t plan to have any children. Evidently, young people’s goals and preferences around relationships and children are in flux and increasingly in tension.” And then he asked the question, “What could explain such striking recent shifts?” 

Okay, I want to back up and say we should have seen and should have known all along that there’s a background issue here. And that is now becoming very clear in the data. And I think for Christians, this is just one of the biggest things we could ever talk about. Okay. So if you ask the question, “Why are birth rates falling?” And you say, “Well, people are having fewer babies.” “Okay. Yeah, but people are having fewer babies?” No, in the specific context, couples are having fewer babies. All right? Now clearly with the sexual revolution and all kinds of reproductive technologies and the rest, there are other claims about “having babies,” same sex couples, single people, et cetera.

But that is not at this point the big statistical issue. The big statistical issue is heterosexual couples not having babies. But here’s the previous issue, the more fundamental issue. It turns out increasingly that the following birth rate is preceded by a falling coupling rate, which is to say the big issue is not that couples are necessarily having fewer children. As a matter of fact, in the United States, married couples are having slightly more children than a decade ago. The reality is fewer people are getting married. They’re not even coupling. So even in context in which they wouldn’t hold to the moral centrality of marriage, they’re simply not coupling. As the Financial Times report says, “One underappreciated difference between the recent decline and earlier phases of the demographic transition is that in the earlier period, the fertility rate fell primarily because couples had fewer children. Today, the main reason is there are fewer couples.” Okay.

Now again, for Christians, every alarm bell should be going off. Now we’re talking about virtually the entire command structure of Genesis 1 being denied. It’s that the man and the woman should come together, male and female, created he/them in the context of marriage, as is made very clear in Genesis Chapter 2, and then the reproduction mandate comes, “Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth,” but you’ll notice it takes the man and the woman together to do that. That’s about as basic as creation order can get. And of course, we as Christians understand that’s revealed within the context of a man and a woman coming together in the covenant of marriage. But the fact is, that the big story here and the following population rate, the birth rate, the big issue here is that fewer human beings male and female are actually coupling in the first place. They’re not coming together as couples.

Okay. So here you have to look at an even deeper level of the research and wow, does this turn out to be really interesting? So let me just turn to another report. Perhaps you’ve seen some of this made headlines, USA Today, a lot of social media news covered all of this in terms of posts because this is one of those things that’s just like made for social media. Okay, here’s the headline, “Smartphone use tied to collapsing birth rate.” Well, this is based in a study and what the study documents is that the arrival of the smartphone as a phenomenon is actually geographically and market by market traceable to following birth rates. Now it’s not a one-to-one equation immediately. It is over time, but it does turn out as researchers from several institutions are making clear, it does turn out that the advent of the smartphone and all that comes with it, you could say social media and all the rest, but the phone in the hand has led to a decreasing birth rate.

Okay. Now by the way, some people are saying, “Was that physiological? Is these men in particular putting phones in their pockets? Is that coming with an effect?” No, it turns out that’s not the big effect. It’s not even just the fact that men and women are spending so much time on the phones, it’s that they’re not spending time with each other. So it turns out that increasing numbers of men and women, young men and young women in particular are spending more time on their phones and they’re just not in context and settings in which they’re likely to meet a future romantic partner who could be a future marital partner. That’s just not happening. It’s not happening. Now, okay, so let’s just as Christians stipulate the fact that there’s something else here that is interesting and that is the fact that at least some patterns of extramarital sexual activity have also fallen, but it turns out that that evidently is at least in part the fact that so many people are simply by themselves and that they’re not in a setting.

And this is, by the way, something that has really affected the statistics on what are often reported as teenage marriage rates. It turns out that those rates have been going down and of course that’s something just in itself that we should celebrate, but the fact is what we shouldn’t celebrate is the fact that a lot of these teenage young men and young women, boys and girls, they’re basically living increasingly solitary lives in which there’s not much of an opportunity for any kind of premarital situation. And of course, that also means when it comes to the absence of the relationship and the absence even of having a conversation with someone from the opposite sex, that clearly is also reflected in decreasing marital rates. 

Okay, so let’s go to another big number. Let’s put some of this stuff together. If you’re looking at the fact that at least in some countries, the largest number of responses in terms of how many children do you have or do you expect to have, the largest single number is zero. Again, it’s such a stunning thing even to say. And then you look at the fact that an increasing number, especially of young women, are saying they don’t really expect to get married either. More young men than young women, according to some survey, say they would like to be married and they would like to be fathers, but the reality is a lot of those young men aren’t doing the things that would be, let’s just say, fundamentally necessary in order to make that happen. The Financial Times report also includes this line. Listen to this, “Demographer Steven Shaw has shown that in most high income countries,” so again, high income countries, so the economic issue’s not the factor. “The number of children mothers give birth to is stable or even rising. What’s fallen steeply over the past 15 years is the share of women who have any children at all.”

So again, it turns out that number zero is actually a lot more important than even you might have thought in the beginning. It turns out that an awful lot of young women are actually aiming at zero. All right, so you also talk about economic matters. Let me talk about something else that a lot of people don’t want to talk about. When you look at this pattern, it’s not evenly distributed. We’re just talking here about the United States. You look at this pattern, it’s not evenly distributed, which is to say that highly educated couples tend, number one, to become couples at a higher rate than those who did not have college educations and also to have children and to raise those children in rather typical, you could say, natural family context. So in other words, an awful lot of these people in the educated elites, are living the very lives they tried to liberate the rest of humanity from or to put it another way, an awful lot of these members of the elite and those who have access to higher education and all the rest, they have been a part overwhelmingly.

In other words, the highly educated, the cultural elites, the people who are really possessing inordinate power in our society. They’ve overwhelmingly been messaging along with the Left saying that, “We really don’t need marriage. We really don’t need those old traditional structures. The natural family can be quite constricting. You should live liberated lives.” But here’s the thing to note, they don’t raise their own children that way. And as a matter of fact, they’d be disappointed if their children followed the very messaging they’ve been giving to the rest of the country. As it turns out what had been the very seat of cultural conservatism in the United States, which had been those who are in traditionally more blue collar settings, it turns out that what had been the center of a lot of conservatism is now in one of the places, it’s now one of the sectors of society where young people are less likely to get married and they’re not only less likely to get married, they’re also less likely you’ll just follow the logic to have children. And so we really are looking at a very, very difficult situation.

Just to add more to the context, The Economist. So again, it’s interesting. These two are coming from Britain. These two big reports, the first in the Financial Times, about as respected as it gets just in terms of the establishment there in the UK and Britain, The Economist about the same kind of category. The headline in this article is: “India’s Population Will Soon be Falling Probably Quite Fast.” So just to put the situation into an economic context, because this is The Economist, okay? They don’t apologize for being concerned about economics. Christians, we’re concerned about economics as well. It’s not the main thing, but you know it is a leading indicator of the priorities, morality, and structures of a society. Okay. So this big article, and it really is huge. It’s three full pages, rather small print in The Economist, it’s telling us that the world’s most populous nation about which just about everybody was warning that the big issue is a population explosion, it’s a population bomb. India is an example of the demographics just gone out of control, haywire. There are going to be too many babies. The population’s going to be too much. You’re going to see mass famine and all the rest. Well, not only with the food revolution, that hasn’t happened. By the way, that kind of ideology is just directly counter to the biblical worldview, the argument that people are the problem. 

No, The Economist is really clear that the falling birth rate in India is going to mean that that country’s peak population is going to happen sooner, much sooner than expected. And after that, almost by definition, the country goes into economic decline. Now there is another aspect of this that turns out to be really important and that is the acknowledgement and this has also been used in other contexts, most importantly, China. It’s the acknowledgement that the great risk to India as a country, as an economy, as a civilization, is that the nation will grow old before it grows rich. Now, if that sounds strange, let me just tell you, that is a major concern of economists. It’s a major concern to talk about a country growing old before it grows rich. And that is because a country that grows old will not grow rich. This has been a big concern of the Chinese communist leaders, but remember they really caused much of it themselves in terms of the one child only policy, just a horrifying policy directly counter to all morality and for that matter since. And yet we also need to know they were really encouraged by Western authorities who said, “Look, there are going to be too many Chinese.” They’re the same people who had been saying, “Look, there are going to be too many Indians.”

And it turns out that China almost assuredly now will grow old before it grows adequately rich in terms of even their national planning. But when it comes to India, the likelihood is, especially since they’re moving that peak population date way back, in other words, it’s coming earlier than almost anyone had expected, then India too may grow old before it grows rich. And what that means is, you can just imagine a graph, a tipping point when the population starts to go down, the market goes down, workers go down, the economy is going to go down. Now still, there are a lot of people on the left who say, “It doesn’t have to be that way. We can just adjust to a smaller population.” And by the way, the people will say, “Look, there are all kinds of benefits to that.”

Well, the problem is that throughout human history, it’s really very, very clear for reasons I think we as Christians accountable to a biblical worldview understand, but we also have to face the fact that as we look here from multiple sources, when the largest single number of children, many women and many societies expect to have a zero, that we are really looking at a worldview crisis. And I just want to end this consideration by saying it also means that as Christians, we understand that as we are driven by a biblical worldview, that also comes with consequences. And one of those consequences is what you see when you go to a biblically ordered church and that is the fact that you’re likely to see a lot of strollers and a lot of babies and a lot of young couples.

And by the way, this also means that Christian parents and Christian churches had better be really, really clear minded about helping Christian young people, young men and young women to be in settings where they can get to know one another, and develop a relationship, and then move in faithfulness towards marriage. And then in marriage, move towards faithfulness in terms of having babies. The reality is that we are now looking at a wake-up call and in that light, the church is either going to respond with faithfulness or with unfaithfulness. At the very least among Christians, the numbers ought to be, let’s just say, appreciably different.

We will talk more about this in days to come, but British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, as expected and predicted, did resign and this is coming after he lost support in his own party. That’s the way it works in a parliamentary system. And we’ll be looking at some of these things just as we see the unfolding of events this week. There’s likely to be some pretty seismic activity in Britain and we are looking at the fact that you have yet another British prime minister whose role has been cut short by his or her own party. 

We’re looking at a pattern of instability in Britain, which is anything but healthy. And even as Britain has often said, “Look, we love the stability of our parliamentary system,” and there is a lot that America learned from that parliamentary system right now. The turnover is pretty remarkable and frankly, that’s a fact that’s pretty ominous. There’s going to be a lot at stake here. For one thing, it looks like the most likely successor to the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who’s himself a man, I think he would say the center left. The reality is that his successor in all likelihood is going to come from the further left.

Again, we’ll be tracking this with you.