In the film Birthgap, filmmaker and demographer Stephen Shaw interviews many people in their 20s and 30s about whether they want to have kids. There is a common refrain: “Yes, but not yet.”
Their concerns are familiar. If they have kids, they will have to change their lifestyle significantly. They will have a lot less time. They will not be able to focus as much on their career - and they would prefer to reach a certain place in their career before having children.
Hearing from the interviewees in Birthgap, my response is, “They’re not wrong.”
There is no more consequential moment for a person in terms of their life priorities and concerns than having children.
In my life, marriage was a significant transition - but having children has required more change in lifestyle. The concerns and desires that begin in teenage and college years, mostly focused around personal pursuits, ambitions, and desires - while these could continue after marriage, children eclipse them to a great degree.
It’s in that light that I approach the hubbub around J. D. Vance’s comments about the childless. Vance has commented about the danger of a large proportion of the political class, especially on the liberal side of the aisle, being childless themselves. He alleges that this gives them less of a stake in the future of the country. His words have been strong, and they have offended many.
In evangelical discourse, Katelyn Beaty, editorial director at Brazos Press, recently criticized J. D. Vance’s comments as “cruel” and attributed them to his adherence to pronatalism. Pronatalism is the movement in political and social thought that is concerned by, and wants to increase, the low birth-rates of 70% of the world’s countries. Beaty criticizes the pronatalist movement for a utilitarian approach to children, as “pawns in the culture war,” that fails to recognize children’s intrinsic dignity.
While I agree with Beaty that a utilitarian approach to children is concerning, the proper Christian response is a better and more holistic pronatalism. The Christian faith should incline us toward a pro-natalism that favors the coming into being of children, the embrace of parenthood, and replacement level birth-rates for the nations of the world.
But our Christian pronatalism must be moderated by a recognition of our post-lapsarian conditions: “In pain you shall bring forth children.” The pain of the fall extends from the bearing to the rearing of children, as the interviewees above notice. Given the difficulty of bearing and rearing children, recognition of the extrinsic reasons to have kids is beneficial. We must recognize children’s intrinsic dignity; yet, the choice to have children will never be free of extrinsic motivation.
Christian pronatalism must not condemn the childless either. After all, the main cause of low fertility rates is not desired but undesired, or involuntary, childlessness. Christian pronatalism must not, therefore, condemn the childless, but give them hope, both in this life and the next.
In “J.D. Vance and the Politicization of Having Kids,” Katelyn Beaty argues that the problem with Vance’s pronatalism is that it betrays “a utilitarian view of children.” She writes (emphasis hers):
“Children, as small people, aren’t pawns in the culture war or widgets in a great plan for civilizational survival. They don’t ultimately exist to make us happy or fulfilled or less afraid of spending our final days on earth alone in a nursing home. Scripture says they are blessings and frequently a source of joy. They are not tools, but gifts.”
Amen. Beaty is certainly correct to caution against subordinating children to our own ends as parents or to those of a political cause.
And yet, she argues that we should rest content with answers like this one, from Emily Hunter McGowin: “From a theological POV, children are gracious gifts. The beloved image of God like every human being. They’re not, strictly speaking, for anything. They’re ends in themselves.”
She continues by emphasizing that the kingdom of God is built “not only through procreation and child-rearing, but also and ultimately through evangelism and baptism.” And finally, she quotes Stanley Hauerwas:
“Christians ‘believe that every Christian in one generation might be called to singleness, yet God will create the church anew.’”
I fear that in her zeal to avoid one error, Christianity as “fertility cult,” Beaty is swinging to another error, a variant of antinomianism.
Is it allowable for couples to choose to have children for anything temporal, of this age? Or must they approach children in a purely theological and spiritual way?
Is it allowable for Christians to undertake action for the good of our societies - even as they are passing away - or should our focus be only on the spiritual kingdom?
How should Christians view our procreative capacities?
To answer that, we need to do a detour through Protestant ethics.
The major fault-line through Christian ethics concerns the validity of secular life. It is ensconced in Catholic Christianity in its divide between religious and secular life; Catholicism embraces both with a tension and a kind of ambivalence. Implicitly if not explicitly, the religious life is higher; but the secular life is recognized as necessary. And post-Vatican II and the creation of lay orders like Opus Dei, secular life has been reaffirmed.
Yet in Protestant Christianity, the divide cuts between traditions. The magisterial Reformation - that is, the Lutheran and Calvinist reformations that worked via the civil magistrate - affirmed the validity and goodness of secular life against a Catholic spiritualism. But the Radical Reformation, which gave birth to the Anabaptist tradition, implied a rejection of existing natural, social, and political order.
The divide is seen most plainly on the question of what Emil Brunner called “The Orders.” We may know them as creation ordinances: Marriage and family, the state, and work and economic organization. The orders are the structures of corporate human life that precede redemption and are rooted in creation and affected by the fall.
The divide in Protestant ethics comes from different answers to this question: What is the place of the orders of creation in Christian life? The radical Reformation questioned them. The magisterial Reformation recognized their necessity and good in human life.
The state is the obvious example. Anabaptists have always questioned the involvement of Christians in politics for its coercive and this-worldly focus. Meanwhile, those appealing to the magisterial Protestant tradition have affirmed the necessity and even good of Christian involvement in political and military action.
With regard to childbearing, this enters discussion as an element of the order of marriage and family. The magisterial Reformation was, from the first, opposed to clerical celibacy and strongly affirmative of the good of the order of marriage and family. The radical Reformation, while less unified, was more skeptical, giving rise both to movements that strongly affirmed celibacy, including for all as with the Shakers, and to sexual license and communism of wives.
In contemporary debate, the divide appears between those who accuse the church of family idolatry, and those who would look to see a renewed emphasis on family in the context of an anti-family secular culture. For example, Aaron Renn has written about a focus on singleness in urban churches that does a disservice to Christians, leading them to marry late and miss out on the opportunity for marriage. On the other hand, Grant Hartley has argued that a focus on marriage amounts to family idolatry and that the church needs to refocus on the legitimacy of celibacy as a calling.
Katelyn Beaty finds herself appealing to Wesley Hill, a founding writer of the spiritual friendship camp, and to Stanley Hauerwas, premiere Anabaptist-influenced theologian. To the former, pronatalism is a necessary aspect of living in accord with natural law and creation ordinances. To the latter, it is a potentially idolatrous pitfall, placing Christian hope in human power instead of divine.
Emil Brunner helps us through this theological and ethical divide. Rather than merely joining a side, he identifies the duality at the heart of the Christian faith. Christ has not come to abolish the law; he reaffirms the orders pointing us back to how things were “from the beginning.” And yet, the radicalism of the kingdom of God and of Christ’s New Commandment relativizes the importance of such things.
At the beginning of his chapter on the orders in The Divine Imperative, Brunner places the following summary proposition:
As Creator, God requires us to recognize and adjust ourselves to the orders He has created, as our first duty; as Redeemer, as our second duty, He bids us ignore the existing orders, and inaugurate a new line of action in view of the coming Kingdom of God.
The Christian life consists in this duality of duty, to borrow from Kierkegaard, the ethical and the religious:
“Slaves, obey your masters.”
“Have him back forever, (Paul writes to Philemon concerning his slave Onesimus) no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother…”
“Each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.”
But, “Let those who have wives live as though they had none.”
“I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”
But, “Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.”
Brunner identifies our first duty with conformity to the orders of creation, living quiet and peaceful lives in accord with marriage, state authority, natural and social inequalities, and the complexities of economic life.
He identifies our second duty with Christ’s radical commandment of love, which can require disregarding our own natural life, challenging state authority, remaining celibate, challenging institutions like slavery, and seeking more just economic arrangements and direct charitable action.
As a good existentialist, Brunner refuses to resolve in theory the conflicts that may arise. The Christian must be attentive to the divine imperative in any given situation, which is always mediated through the orders, and yet may at any moment transcend them as well.
The modern egalitarian, personalist ethic which we find in Kant and in today’s liberal ethic of consent Brunner identifies as a radicalization of Christ’s New Commandment and a disregard for our first duty. The contemporary ethic views the Orders as sources of inequality and disregard of personality.
Yet Brunner cautions that we are not disembodied spirits, mere Kantian persons, or atomized liberal individuals. We are human men and women, bound by the complexities of nature and society, and shaped by the orders. To love human beings, we must love them in accord with the created order of which they are apart, not in disregard of their nature.
Beaty’s critique of Vance’s pronatalism has the form of emphasizing our second duty against our first duty, the characteristically Radical Reformation pattern. Beaty argues that to treat children as a means to civilizational progress or national success is to disregard their intrinsic value. In essence, she urges the personalist ethic of love against a naturalistic or politicized approach to children.
But among today’s pronatalists, Beaty’s critique accurately diagnoses the error with prominent secular forms of pronatalism. For example, Elon Musk’s pronatalism has led him to father children with many women, including ones to whom he has not only never been married, but never even partnered. (He fathered children with a female employee via IVF.) While we cannot expect a non-Christian to act like a Christian, it is evident that this course of action disregards the natural order in order to achieve a utilitarian end (more children by whatever means possible).
Likewise, Simone and Malcolm Collins, while a fascinating example, have allowed a utilitarian approach to shape their child-bearing and rearing. They have utilized IVF, are definitely having children for ideological reasons, and even engaged in embryo selection in a way that is at least incipiently eugenic.
In his Ethics, Bonhoeffer critiques a eugenic and vitalist approach to children among his German contemporaries. (Note: Bonhoeffer’s unfinished Ethics is heavily indebted to Brunner’s The Divine Imperative.) Yet, in Bonhoeffer, it is abundantly evident that pronatalism per se is eminently separable from the eugenic, political, and utilitarian approach to children.
Encouraging people to disregard the natural order in order to have more and healthier children, selecting among embryos to find the “most fit to live,” and multiplying one’s progeny through sperm donation - these would certainly evidence a utilitarian approach to the problem of low birth-rates.
However, I do not see many Christians tempted by this kind of pronatalism. Rather, Christian pronatalism tends to support relative early marriage and child-bearing and the prioritization of family over career. Are these people guilty of subordinating children to further ends?
Is it permissible to have children for reasons other than that they might “glorify and enjoy God forever?”
The righteous and normal motivations for having children are not, I think, adequately captured either by Beaty’s description nor by the politicized motivations of Musk, the Collins, and National Socialists.
Most obviously, the personalist ethic of Kant provides reason to treat existing people with esteem, but it provides no reasons to make new people. You can’t decide to conceive a child out of love for that child (what child?) or out of the recognition that he or she is made in the image of God.
And yet, this is not to say that the child is thereby treated as a means to an end. For instance, one test in Kantian ethics of whether an individual is being treated as a means or an end is whether they are interchangeable. For instance, in marital love, the individual is loved as an end. If you swapped out another individual at the altar, she would not do just as well. On the other hand, in pornography consumption, one object of desire is almost immediately traded for another object of desire. The individual is not loved but used.
Yet, in having a child, one desires to have any product of one’s and one’s spouse’s gametes. (Or in adoption, any child who meets one’s desired criteria.) The child is, to this extent, interchangeable. Yet they are interchangeable only for a brief moment, after which they are loved as an individual. After conception, a man and a woman may love a zygote because that zygote is their child.
All this may seem far afield from Beaty’s point, yet it is quite relevant. She asks, what are children for? And the fact is, every parent could give you many answers, all of them less pious than those Beaty quotes.
A man may have a child because he desires to be a father.
A woman may desire to have a child because “she just loves babies.”
A man may desire a child because he wants to pass on the family name (and so desires a son - fraught, I know, but not unnatural).
And a couple may have a child, let’s say a third child, in order to have a family at above replacement rate.
Nevertheless, Beaty is certainly right in the following criticisms:
Children, as small people, aren’t pawns in the culture war or widgets in a great plan for civilizational survival. They don’t ultimately exist to make us happy or fulfilled or less afraid of spending our final days on earth alone in a nursing home.
But to deny that children are for anything else is to ignore the natural, created, bodily, and desiderative dimensions of childbearing. The joy of seeing one’s own features on the cute face of a child; the hope of being cared for by one’s adult children in old-age rather than a nursing home; the prospect of friendship with children who share one’s interests. And the prospect of contributing to one’s nation and civilization by raising up another generation.
These motivations all operate on a natural level, rather than the spiritual level. But we can’t deny the importance of these things on that level.
Falling into the Anabaptist, nature-denying camp, we risk becoming what Renn, following the writer The Social Pathologist, calls Christian Buddhists. We become but another form of world-denying fundamentalists.
One erroneous pronatalism is, then, the secular pronatalism of Musk, the Collins, and the National Socialists.
However, this is not the prominent form of erroneous pronatalism among American Christians. The erroneous pronatalism that arises among us is this: A pronatalism that downplays the effects of the fall on childbearing and rearing. It is a utopian and Edenic form of pronatalism that falls under the criticism of “family idolatry” that I often hear.
It is represented symbolically, as often on social media, by photogenic couples prancing through Edenic fields with a gaggle of children.
Its theological father is Martin Luther whose pronatalism was quite unqualified.
Yet this species of pronatalism ignores the effects of the fall on the creation-ordinance of procreation: “To the woman he said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” (Genesis 3:16) One of the chief effects of the fall was introducing difficulty into the bearing and rearing of children. The curse on the woman is not only about labor-pains, nor only about women. Bearing and rearing children is difficult.
There are various ways those on the Christian, pronatalist Right try to get around this. They- well, we - say that children are only hard because we have too few of them, or because we don’t work together on the farm, or because we don’t have the mindset that children are gifts.
This is simply to blame modern conditions for our sufferings. It is to deny that they are part of postlapsarian (post-fall) conditions. Genesis was, after all, written to a pre-modern, agrarian society. If the physical pain, or at least the risk of death, of childbirth was even greater then than now, then the psychological and economic pain of child-rearing is greater now than then.
After all, we live in not only post-lapsarian conditions but also modern ones. It may be true that in earlier times, children were economic assets. But the fact is, that in modern times and conditions, they are not. The incentives for parents have significantly changed, and while some people have success recreating those conditions by home-steading and home-schooling, not everyone can, will, or should.
Today, we have to admit that children are not economic assets, except in rare circumstances. They are costly economically, but also emotionally, and temporally. The idea that because children are a gift there is nothing negative to be said about them is false. It is a kind of propaganda or advertising.
The pronatalism we need is one that recognizes our postlapsarian conditions. Actually, we need pronatalism because having children is hard and, under modernity, eminently optional.
While reading Matthew Lee Anderson’s essay “Procreation and Children” in Protestant Social Teaching I was struck by this summary of Augustine: “Those who are given children should give more thought to raising them rather than having more–and those without children should give thanks for their lack of troubles.” It was the first theological recognition I had read of the difficulty of having children and a limit on pronatalism itself.
At the time, my theology - implicitly more than explicitly - did not acknowledge the great difficulty of having children, even while, as a father of three, I felt a significant weight and discouragement. Without this recognition of the fall’s effect on procreation, I was in the position of the disabled Prosperity-gospeller, thinking that it was my own lack of faith, or of home-schooling, or of Stoic grit that made being a father difficult. No, I discovered - it was the fall. A Christian account of procreation must include the difficulty of raising children east of Eden.
A Christian pronatalism must also refrain from condemning the childless or those who have small families.
In this, I have been strongly influenced by Stephen Shaw, the leading expert on what he calls “the Birthgap,” the numerical difference between the number of adults of a given cohort and the number of newborns in a society. 70% of the world’s countries now experience a birthgap, aka, below replacement level birth-rates.
Shaw found that the culprit is emphatically not people having one or two children instead of three, four, or more. On the contrary, family size has remained relatively constant since the 1960s when the birth gap began to develop. The same percentage of families have four or more children now as then, and the same for families of three, two, and one.
The birthgap arises from increased numbers of the childless. And the vast majority of these are not voluntarily childless but involuntarily childless.
The social causes seem to have been economic shocks that societies interpreted as calling into question the long-term viability of raising children, as well as patterns of young people choosing career over family and believing that they can have families later into their thirties and forties. Shaw finds that, if a woman does not have a child by thirty, her chances of becoming a mother are a mere 50%.
So far, no society has found a way to turn around low birth-rates. The same occurred toward the end of the Roman Empire. It pursued pronatalist policies, to no avail. Countries like Hungary have offered financial incentives for having more children, also to almost no avail.
The only intervention mentioned in the film that was effective was a social one, rather than a political one. The film describes a South Korean social program that allows young people to spend time with children to give parenting a trial run. They also spend time with whole families, to see role models of parents. In South Korea, there are .81 births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, and the lowest fertility rate in the world.
Strikingly, one young woman interviewed said that she did not know anyone of her cohort who had children. It was only after she joined the program that she saw examples of people flourishing as parents and developed a desire to be a parent herself.
Shaw is not himself a Christian nor, publicly anyway, a conservative. He finds that young people are dismayed by the demographic information he shares. He sees hope for our societies if this message is spread.
But the hope he offers does not merely concern the fate of countries. It is personal hope in the face of involuntary childlessness, regrets, failed IVF attempts, and more.
As I reflect on this, I see the great privilege of being a part of Christian communities in which one knows young parents while one is in college and one’s early twenties. This leads people to marry and become parents on the earlier side themselves.
None of this is “family idolatry” inherently. At times, I have been tempted to spiritual pride on account of these decisions; that is wrong. However, the danger of Pharisaic-pride in law-keeping is not the only danger. The danger of involuntary childlessness is real.
While we do not put ultimate hope in children, it would be wrong for Christians not to affirm the goodness of procreation. In fact, the promises that Christ offers: “there is no one who has given up … children … for My sake and for the gospel's sake, who will not receive a hundred times as much now in the present age” (Mark 10:29) - these promises only make sense against the backdrop of childlessness being a loss. Christ gives hope to the childless; but he does not abolish the law, human nature, or the Orders themselves.
What are the prospects for a positive Christian pronatalism?
My encouragements are four:
Our response to concerns about the difficulty of rearing children cannot be that it is not difficult, that having children is an unmitigated good. We need support in the tragic conditions of existence, the miseries of this life, and the pain of child-bearing and rearing. This includes recognizing human limits on the number of children couples may be able or desire to have.
If child-rearing is difficult, it cannot be left to each couple to fend for themselves. Extended families should be encouraged as well as church cultures that support those with children.
While marriages that are too early tend to end in divorce, Christians are not wrong to encourage marriage and child-bearing in people’s twenties. Human nature is at peak fertility before age thirty-five, for women and men, and younger parents have energy and stamina to face sleepless nights and rambunctious toddlers. Grace restores, rather than abolishes, nature.
Christian communities that encourage bearing and rearing children should also be ones that provide hope and a place for the childless. Here, Beaty is obviously correct to cite Wesley Hill. Hill is godfather to the two children of the married couple with whom he lives. Single, exclusively same-sex attracted, and committed to celibacy, Hill requires a place in Christian community that is not isolated from family and children.
As Augustine wrote, even “childless couples can be fruitful—it may be, Augustine argues, ‘that some of those young olive saplings crowding round the Lord’s table are your spiritual children, borne to you by mother Church’” (Protestant Social Teaching, 100-101). The prophet Isaiah continues the blessings to the childless: “I (the LORD) will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’” (Isaiah 56:4-5).
If J. D. Vance adopted this kind of pronatalist rhetoric, I think the public reputation of pronatalism would be different, and our pronatalism would more faithfully reflect Christian doctrine, hope, and love.