If you had told me a year ago that I would be attending a conference on Theonomy & Postmillennialism I would have told you to say no to drugs. But there I was in Georgetown, Texas last weekend with about 500 other people who seem to also have drunk the post-mill Kool Aid as if it was a real, biblical eschatological option. Prior to my “conversion” I didn’t think there were 500 post-mill people in the world let alone that many of them would find their way to a conference in Texas, but there they were. And the vibe was electric. I’m going to do two posts on the conference. While this first one will be primarily about children, and you’ll see why, the next one will be more meat and potatoes eschatology. The two are connected as I hope to convey.

I thought like a death metal concert, most of the audience would be dudes, and especially dudes with beards. Strange how beards have made a come back in America, and we’re talking long, nineteenth century type beards. There were definitely those, but what I didn’t expect was all the children and families. When the speakers were talking there was always the sounds of babies. I was sitting toward the front initially, and had no idea just how many children parents brought to this conference. After initially being annoyed by the disruption, I started to appreciate it, the young, new life, the indication of the blessing of God a la Psalm 127. As Solomon says, “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” It’s unfortunate how man Christians in our day want fewer blessings rather than more, that’s how infected we’ve become with secularism.

Before I address that, on Saturday morning I was sitting in the midst of these families amazed at how well behaved all the children were. I thought, don’t all families bring their children to a conference on post millennialism on a beautiful spring Saturday? Of course they do! After the session, I asked the gentlemen sitting in front of me with all these kids how many children they have, and he said . . . . ten! Be honest, your first reaction to reading or hearing that is a kind of revulsion, right? Don’t lie to me. In the modern secular post-Christian West having ten children is looked at as at least strange. It almost seems wrong. You think of the poor woman who bore all those children. That’s a lot of work! And raising them is ten full-time jobs. I would contend our initial reaction, while understandable given how programmed we’ve become by secularism, is sin. God tells us children are a blessing, full stop. I found out the man with these ten blessings is Phil George, the pastor of Grace Life Church in Dallas. May he and his wife, and their tribe, increase, and that tribe doesn’t have to have that many children.

Which brings me to an article I providentially read after my profound children post-mill conference experience: Western culture is at fault for dwindling birth rates: We are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages. The author, Louise perry, starts the piece with a wonderful analogy of the Cassava plant that was made safe to eat by South Americans hundreds of years ago. Without that process, unbeknownst to them, the people eating it would be slowly poisoned to death by cyanide. Though the people didn’t realize the traditions of cleaning and processing the plant was saving lives, they did it anyway. She compares that to the tradition around a fertility culture where extended families and societies made it easier for women to bear the burden of having and raising children. The analogy is powerful. People in the Western world, which is most of the world today, don’t realize we are as a civilization slowly being poisoned to death by what she calls “the sterility meme.”

The word crisis in her title is more appropriate than anyone knows or will admit. Like being slowly poisoned by eating unprocessed Casava plants, civilization is slowly being poisoned by not enough children being born:

The effects of fertility decline will not become evident until the last above-replacement generation dies. In Britain, that tipping point is likely to come in the 2040s, when most of the baby boomers have passed away. Right now, we are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages, and most people do not recognize it as such. If modernity is cassava, then this is the cyanide.

She states the problem with modernity such:

But what we are now discovering is that, at the population level, modernity selects systematically against itself. The key features of modernity — urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, more time spent with strangers than with kin — all of these factors in combination shred fertility. Which means that progressivism, the political ideology that urges on the acceleration of modernization, can best be understood as a sterility meme. When people first become modern, they have fewer children; when they adopt progressive ideology, they accelerate the process of modernization and so have even fewer.

These are all complex sociological and psychological phenomena, but Christians are not immune. If you go to many churches today you’ll see that most families have two children. We must ask ourselves as Christians, is having only two children on purpose biblical? Is it living in obedience to God? Or is it succumbing to the “spirit of the age”? I would argue it is the latter.

Having said this, I understand why so many Christian families succumb to it. It’s been pounded into our heads almost as long as I’ve been alive, that there are “too many people” on earth, it’s unsustainable. The word “overpopulation” is an axiom, unquestioned as if it were obviously true. Then there is the little issue of children being expensive, and putting a real crimp in your lifestyle. I laughed out loud, literally, when I read this in the piece:

As one of my friends observed soon after having her first baby, “the only thing that limits your freedom more than having a newborn is going to prison.” She’s right.

Raising children is hard! All consuming. If freedom is a priority in our lives, we will have fewer children, and sadly these impediments to having more children keep too many Christian families from having more children.

I once told an Italian couple at a church we attended some years ago that we need to out breed the enemy, speaking of the secularists. Their look told me they weren’t quite sure what to make of that statement. They now have two children, and it looks like they’re stopping there, unfortunately. If I knew thirty years ago what I know now, as the saying goes, I would have tried for more than three children. Three has been an incredible blessing, so I can only imagine the blessings of more. Christians, and religious people in general, do have more children than secular people, but I pray in due course it would become many more.