Imagine a world without children. Now that would be a dystopia! It’s increasingly happening in countries throughout the world.
I wrote a piece recently about the demographic apocalypse currently enveloping the world and one British woman’s choice to wait too long before deciding to have children. I called it, Have More Babies! I discuss how we got to a point in Western history where having fewer children became a moral good. Environmental extremists based on their assumptions are nothing if not rational. They believe, a la Thomas Malthus, that the world’s resources are limited, and if people have too many children there eventually won’t be enough food to feed the world. That’s a blatant lie from the pit of hell, but if you believe it, you are obligated to be morally opposed to too many babies.
God, however, created a world plenty able to provide for his creatures, and to not believe that is a sin. If we have believed it, or do now, we must repent.
And before you go there, yes we are obligated to be good and faithful stewards of what God has blessed us with, but that’s not the point. What is, is a lie of the devil that destroys people and the possibility of blessing and true human flourishing—that is only possible in obedience to, “be fruitful and multiply.”
Before I address the sin/blessing aspect of our understanding of God’s very good creation, I will share the depressing inspiration for this piece, an article last year from First Things titled, “Anti-Natal Engineering.” That’s click bait for me, and I was not disappointed; depressed, but not disappointed. You should read it if you want to be depressed too. It’s one country’s story of secularism run amuck. Without obedience to God and his word, and the truth about reality revealed in it, this country took its unbiblical assumptions to their logical conclusion. They’ve realized now that it’s too late how terribly wrong they were. That country is South Korea. Other countries in the West fell for the same lie, but none with the commitment and rigor of South Korea.
South Korea’s Journey to an Anti-Natalist Dystopia
The concept of dystopia was bequeathed to us by the modern secular world. Everyone knows it means something like “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.” In modern Latin Utopia means literally “nowhere.” It was coined by Thomas More and used as the title of his 1516 book about an imaginary island enjoying perfection in legal, social, and political systems.
Dystopia was first used in 1844 by J. S. Mill, but started getting its negative connotation in the early 1950s. As science fiction in popular culture grew, and as secularism flattened life, sinful human imagination created dystopian worlds of unimaginable suffering and hopelessness. That in itself would be a fascinating study beyond the scope of this piece. The reason God commanded Adam and Eve, and us, to be fruitful and multiply, is because He knew without children Dystopia would be the result. Yet, that’s what so many secular people think they want. How did this happen in South Korea?
In the 1960s, the average South Korean women gave birth to six children—today it’s the lowest in the world at 0.79. To get there took a concerted effort on the part of their secular government in the early 1960s. The environmental movement got its start in the early ‘60s, and “overpopulation” became a mantra to shame people into having fewer children. The South Korean government developed this anti-natal mentality into a well-oiled machine through policy and propaganda. It worked exceptionally well, so well in fact, as they’ve tried to backtrack that isn’t working. Women still aren’t having babies.
Ironically, the government did this because they thought by it the nation might thrive, but a nation can’t thrive without lots of babies. Demographers realized this a while ago, and now are sounding the alarm.
What’s fascinating about South Korea is that unlike the West, there was no sexual revolution. Throughout the decades the culture remained conservative, yet because of effective government and cultural propaganda, children became an optional part of family life, instead of the center of it. The First Things piece states:
South Korea’s public philosophy, not initially informed by the principles of modern feminism or the sexual revolution, emphasized the trials and costs of parenthood in order to encourage fewer people to become parents and people to become parents of fewer.
This worked on a material level. South Korea went from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest. But wealth without children is poverty, especially the poverty of loneliness. This anti-natalist message and mentality has other unexpected consequences. For South Korea,
What began as an effort to achieve national greatness through population control has ended up promoting cultural conflict between men and women and threatening national suicide through population decline.
As demographers have increasingly realized, anti-natalism is a recipe for disaster of dystopian proportions. Imagine going by a playground on the way to work, and there never being any children there. That is dystopia; as the author says, national suicide. The Bible, by contrast, says a society or community having lots of children is a blessing, and a requirement for true human flourishing. From Psalm 127:
3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
Approximating Utopia on Earth
We know that this nowhere place actually does exist, just not on this fallen earth. For Christians heaven is that place, which in due course will be this earth renewed. Until then, on Christ’s own command in the Lord’s prayer, we are bringing some of that nowhere, heaven, God’s will be done, to this fallen earth. We can’t create heaven on earth, but we sure can approximate it. That is the Great Commission to disciple the nations, inaugurated at Pentecost by the power of the Holy Spirit, and God’s covenant promises in Christ. But does God really want this heaven on earth to grow slowly but very surely a la the parable of the mustard seed and leaven or yeast (Matt. 13:31-33)? Absolutely! The biblical case is easy to make, but that’s not the purpose of this post. Rather, it is how we overcome this anti-natalist Dystopia. I’ll start with the first book of the Bible.
The foundational book of the Bible is about blessing. The word blessing is used upward of 70 times in Genesis. What does blessing mean? The Hebrew, Barak, doesn’t help much; it just means to kneel, bless. We know blessing is a good thing, to be blessed and to bless, but it’s helpful to explore its meaning more fully.
Greek uses a couple words for bless implied by the Hebrew, eulogeó- εὐλογέω, to speak well of, praise, and makarios- μακάριος, happy, blessed, to be envied. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s a state of existence where things are working, and it’s apparent not only to the person blessed, but to others.
I came across a lecture by Dr. Mark Futato of Reformed Theological Seminary on Genesis, and he argues that the key theme of the book is “blessing for the nations.” He specifically took that from God’s covenant promises to Abraham. What struck me was his definition of blessing: empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he puts it, “God empowers people to flourish.” I love that! Secularists paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10):
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
The beauty of Christianity is that it isn’t just personally transformational but transformational in every way, societal, technological, relational, material, etc. It effects every single thing human beings put their minds and efforts to in the light of God’s word, the gospel, and His law, for our good and His glory. These blessings will eventually leak out from God’s people to bless society. And we are never under the illusion these blessings are solely due to us, but they can’t happen without us, Christ’s body.
The Path to Blessing is Through Having Lots of Babies!
In Genesis, God is specifically establishing his covenant with Abram so through him and his offspring the nations will be blessed. We see throughout Genesis and in God’s covenant promises to Abram that these blessings are to touch so many people they literally can’t be counted (sand of the seashore, stars in the sky, and dust of the earth). God is not miserly in spreading his blessings on earth, and because of his covenant promise immediately after the fall, we realize all of it is done in the face of a cosmic spiritual war to frustrate the devil’s plans. This means it will never be easy and will be done in the face of constant adversity and opposition, but through which we can rejoice in the victory already won by our risen Lord.
One primary way these blessings come is through having lots of babies, and raising them in the fear and admonition of the Lord. I’ve been bummed out in these four plus decades of going to church seeing how many Christian families have two children. Far be it from me to “judge” the parents, but I always wonder how many of them choose to just have two. I believe while maybe not sin, it is terribly sad they don’t realize the call of God on their lives to be fruitful and multiply is not an option.
One reason this should be obvious to Christians is that from the beginning, it is apparent that the faith of God’s people is multi-generational. The word children is used over 450 times in the Bible. Unlike the dominant secularism, Children in the Christian worldview are not a drain of resources, but a way to expand them. In the Bible, not having children was a sign of God’s curse, having many a sign of God’s blessing. That has not changed. Why would Christians want to have fewer blessings and not more?
If we really want to challenge the secularism of our time, and eventually defeat it, the way this will happen is to believe God about the blessings of children for our lives, and the eventual blessing of our society. If we really believe God, then Christian families will have a lot of children, far more than secular families. It is already true that religious families have more children than secular families, but if we are able, and married, we need to up our game.
So I end with the solution to the anti-natalist dystopia: Have more babies!
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