Fertility Shows Why Christians Must Be Concerned about Political Greatness
To Bet on the Future, You Must Believe in the Greatness of Your Civilization
Editor’s note: This is a modified version of a talk given at the Trad Dad conference in Battleground, Washington October 25, 2024.
I first thought about the problem of birth rates while writing my dissertation on David Hume.
Hume’s essay “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” showed that ancient nations were more sparsely populated than modern ones. Modern freedom had caused the population growth underway during his lifetime, Hume argued. “In the flourishing age of the world,” Hume writes, “it may be expected, that the human species should possess greater vigour both of mind and body, more prosperous health, higher spirits, longer life, and a stronger inclination and power of generation.” Simply removing impediments like economic scarcity to the “desire and power of generation” will lead to an increase in population. As Hume predicted, Europe’s population grew with advances in industry and commerce, from about 120 million in 1700, to 210 million in 1800, and about 425 million in 1900 and about 750 million in 2000.
Yet something was missing in Hume’s analysis as I tested his thesis against current trends. Ben Wattenberg was the authority on population trends during the 1990s. At the time, more people like Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome worried about overpopulation. Wattenberg’s 1987 book The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Children sounded the alarm about a population implosion. He even debated Ehrlich on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show!
Time vindicated Wattenberg. Books like Phillip Longman’s The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (2004) revealed a riddle. Ours was a period of industry and commerce and of declining birth rates. What did Hume get wrong?
I gave my first talk on the riddle in Hume’s observation at Brigham Young University in 2003 to a mostly skeptical faculty still bewitched by Ehrlich’s overpopulation thesis. Hume’s linkage of commerce to increasing birth rates was, I argued, an incomplete theory of hope. Having kids is a bet on the future. People who do not believe in a good human future and a deep sense of purpose for the future will not have children. Christianity speaks highly of hope (1 Cor 13:13). Men who have forgotten God do not have children. In addition, Christianity supports a sexual constitution favorable to having children, both teaching sexual continence and making fecundity a duty.
My original position of more faith; more babies was not stupid. The United States, among the most religious countries in the world, had near replacement birth rates in the early aughts. Religious Americans had higher birth rates than lefties and atheists. Lefty books like Longman’s bemoaned the religious inheriting the world. (Eric Kaufmann agreed about the outcome in his Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-first Century in 2010.)
I am less convinced today. The focus on faith and hope fails to account for many population explosions. It is ambiguous on why people should hope. Today’s Christians have higher birth rates, but they are low compared to Christian birth rates from earlier eras. Hope can be theological and political, which I learned through a confrontation with Montesquieu, a great French thinker from a generation before Hume.
Hume was debating Montesquieu on population. In Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that ancient nations were more populous than modern nations—a notion Hume refuted through clever sleuthing. Montesquieu was on to something, however. Compared to what came before them, Greek cities like Athens and Corinth unleashed animal spirits that sent population and birth rates soaring. The Greek polis was a giant leap forward for mankind.
Before the Greeks, most peoples were governed either according to the way of the tribe or the empire. Tribes were extended families, selecting fathers as leaders and submitting to them as masters. Empires were governed by fear and force, with each person owing his position to kingly favor. Greece was a “great nation made up of towns, each having its government and its laws,” according to Montesquieu. The people of each territory combined with established families to cultivate a common way of life, with civic gods and common laws. The Athenians, Corinthians, and Spartans—as well as Syracuse, Carthage, and Rome—discovered a new moral continent.
This discovery unleashed animal spirits. Having lots of children helped achieve fantastic possibilities. Political eros fueled eros. Political energy coincided with sexual energy. “With a small territory and a great felicity,” Montesquieu writes, “it was easy for the number of citizens to increase.” Cities “were full of small people and glutted with inhabitants.” Greek cities, along with republican Rome, were what Montesquieu called “nascent peoples.” Such peoples, as Montesquieu writes, “multiply and increase greatly.” Among nascent peoples, it is “a great discomfort to live in celibacy,” and “it is not a discomfort to have many children.” The joys of engaging in something new and great make the struggles of bearing and raising children much easier. People occupied and even over-occupied with important public work are most hopeful. They bet on the future. They have children. Their cities grow.
All was not olives and wine. Greek economies were not diverse. Economies were stagnant and mainly agricultural. “Greek political men were. . . particularly attached to regulating the number of citizens” since they could not easily feed more mouths. The most humane of the cities “constantly made colonies.” Corinth, Athens, and Syracuse birthed colonies all over Greece. Cities sometimes encouraged excess citizens to become mercenaries. Harsher cities practiced infanticide to keep populations down or channeled sexual energies away from procreative sex (i.e., promoting pederasty).
The thoughts of Hume and Montesquieu could be reconciled by re-centering Hume’s thoughts on commerce. For Hume, commerce made people hopeful. The civilizational confidence and vitality he noticed really came from the birth of the modern nation states—a wholly new and dynamic political form. Still, commerce gave new citizens ways of living that the ancient world lacked. “If one neglects the arts and attaches oneself only to agriculture, the country cannot be populated,” writes Montesquieu. Under conditions of commerce and industry, nascent peoples can grow exponentially.
Hopeful people bear the burdens of great enterprises lightly. Nascent peoples find a strict, disciplinary sexual constitution relatively easy to bear. There is too much to do to tolerate horsing around. For Montesquieu, “public continence is joined naturally to the propagation of the species,” as are laws that fix “the family in succession of persons of the same sex” and patriarchal arrangements amidst family life. Public continence involves, among other things, applying shame and the rigor of the law against “illicit unions” and prostitution.
Great work on today’s birthrates confirms that generally patriarchal norms and conditions lead to baby booms. New, hopeful political possibilities were underway. J.D. Unwin’s tome Sex and Culture (1934) shows the indissoluble link between cultural vitality and a conservative sexual constitution. (Unwin discovered public celebration of sexual license leads to cultural and political decadence in three generations, with no exceptions.) When men’s earnings are substantially higher than women’s, baby booms happen. Women’s formal education is also highly correlated to birth dearth. Patriarchal times coincide with eras of incredible political vitality.
Decadent times, in contrast, bring birth dearths. The “small republics” of Greece were, Montesquieu writes, “swallowed up” by the Romans, “and the universe was gradually seen to lose population.” He continues: “By destroying all the peoples,” the Romans “destroyed themselves.” The old Romans had censors, whose policing of marriage was barely needed. The “corruption of mores” characteristic of the Roman Empire “destroyed the censorship,” though it was more needed.
Rome sought to replace political vitality with incentives to have children. “Few citizens remained, and most of them were not married” after the empire was established. Civil wars raged. Montesquieu relates a speech of Caesar Augustus, who made the case that child-rearing compromised the comforts and pleasures among the empire’s subjects:
The city does not consist in houses, porticoes, public squares; it is men who make the city. You will not see men emerge from the earth to take care of your business, as in legend. It is not to live alone that you remain celibate: each one of you has companions at his table and in his bed, and you each seek only peace for your profligacy.
Augustus imposed penalties for remaining unmarried or childless, while rewarding those who married and had children with honors and privileges. Husbands could not bequeath much inheritance to wives unless they had children together. Women without children or husbands could not wear precious stones. Young men with wives and children were eligible for offices at an earlier age. Spouses got better seats at the theater. The most fecund married senators spoke first and got their choice of provinces. When wives died, widowers had two years to remarry. Fathers had to give dowries. Men over a certain age could not remarry women past childbearing age.
Augustus’s laws failed to move the needle. Still some advocates today hope, like the Romans, to replace political vitality with incentives to have children. So far economic incentives have done little to promote fecundity among modern nations (as I argue here and here; for contrary view see Lyman Stone, kind of).
Others hope elevating the status of motherhood would “incentivize” fecundity, none with greater eloquence than Johann Kurtz. @MoreBabies likewise argues that Mongolian policies of elevating the status of motherhood solves the problem of low birth rates (Mongolian rates are approximately 2.7 births per woman). Mongolian women with four children are presented with the Order of Glorious Motherhood, Second Class medal; those with six get First Class. Similar policies in Russia during 2008 have not (yet!) succeeded as much as Mongolia’s. Russia’s total fertility rate (TFR) was mired below 1.5, though it reached 1.7-8 in the mid -2010s. Still, to compare Mongolia today (TFR 2.7) to Russia and Mongolia of 1980 (TFR 6.4) is to see the effects of a world grown old. Elevating the status of motherhood, while desirable, operates within the broader framework of political decadence.
Modern birth rates are low because the world lacks political and cultural vitality. We live in decadent times. Under our conditions, family policy can do some to encourage parents to have children. I am all for increasing benefits to families with children, if only to reward people having children (i.e., our people). I am all for elevating the status of motherhood. Perhaps these policies could nudge birth rates above 2.5 TFR–historically low, but pretty good for a decadent people.
The best thing to promote fertility is to promote marriage. This means discouraging ideologies hostile to marriage and promoting healthy religious belief. Ideologies are lullabies, entrancing people to embrace the bright side of cultural decay. James Burnham called liberalism the ideology of western suicide. Among modern Western peoples, feminism and sexual liberation ideologies are our lullabies. Opposing compulsory feminism is crucial in this regard.
Montesquieu thought the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity dampened birth rates, since, in his view, Christianity encourages spirituality and otherworldliness, not this-worldly family life. Evidence hardly supports that view. Christians have higher birth rates, and the gaps between the secular and the Christian are growing in magnitude and importance. Christian faith teaches an alternative vision of female accomplishment to the one offered in America’s decadent culture. Christianity promotes a disciplined sexual constitution. Christian hope does not fully replace political vitality, but it provides a real reason for maintaining self-control and sexual continence in one’s life. It supports a duty to bear and raise children. Christianity is not alone in any of these regards (Hasidic Jews have among the highest TFRs in the world).
Christianity is not enough to raise fertility, but it ain’t nothing. Man is both a political animal and a religious animal. Political greatness and vitality foster fuller Christian practice of bearing and raising Godly children. The struggles of parenthood appear as nothing when we have great things to do in the political and religious worlds. Christians have a duty to make America great again.
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