The decline of Christianity with the rise of secularism in America has had disastrous consequences. At the center of this sad state of affairs is the decline of the family from which all civilizational and human flourishing emerges, as I wrote about recently. Sadly, not only are families increasingly dysfunctional, but many young people are no longer even getting married, let alone having families. The latter likely contributes to the former, given many people never experience or witness families that work and are blessed as God intended them to be. American, and Western culture in general, is like a dense secular moral English fog people negotiate every day pretending it’s a sunny day at the beach in the south of France. Like a wet blanket, the morass of secularism clings to people who aren’t even aware it exists. Secularism has infected Christians as well, often when it comes to having children and how many to have.
For secular people having rejected God’s revelation in creation, Scripture, and Christ, they walk through life virtually blind, stumbling into things they can’t see, wondering why they are so miserable. Christians, on the other hand, have been given the user’s manual directly from the Creator, and having children, bringing other beings into this world, giving them life, is the greatest blessing we as those created in God’s image can have. Hearing about the blessing of having large families, lots of children (let’s say five, six, seven kids), is something I’ve never come across in any church I’ve attended in 47 years as a Christian. It wasn’t until I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022 (as anyone who reads my work consistently knows, and is getting tired of hearing) that I came across a Christian community that extols large families.
Over the years I’ve heard sermons on raising kids, but not having more kids. I don’t remember, but I’m sure I’ve heard sermons that on Psalm 127 where Solomon proclaims the blessing of lots of kids.
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.
I’ve long wondered why so many Christians seems to want fewer rather than more rewards, or who don’t seem to want to seek God’s blessing by filling their quiver full of them. There are several reasons for that, not least is that it’s hard and scary. The sacrifice can be immense. My daughter and her husband had three under three this entire year, and their oldest turned four in just last week. It’s exhausting, but they wouldn’t give it up for the world. My daughter already laments how fast it’s going, and as many of us already know, in the blink of an eye it’s over.
Another reason is that most pastors, let alone Christians, do not believe having large families is in fact a biblical imperative. Rather, the mindset is that having children is just another “lifestyle choice,” as marriage itself is increasingly for secular young people. I argue that it is in fact not a choice but something God expects of his people if He’s given them the ability to do it. Which brings us to culture.
The Importance of Culture
We went to a church for a number of years and seeing so many families with just two children distressed me. Such parents have no idea how much that secular fog I mentioned influences them and their decisions to have children and how many. I knew a Christian guy some years ago and he and his wife decided not to have any children, and he thought that was okay! That blew my mind. I know this fog influenced us when we were younger and starting to think about having children. My wife wanted two because she came from a family of two, and I insisted on three, given that’s what we had in our family. I got my way, but it never occurred to us that 5 or 6 kids was even an option. With the old 20/20 hindsight that is life, if I knew then what I know now . . . . We were caught in the secular fog like most others.
Given we live at the end of 300 to 400 years of secular cultural development in the West, the great Everest challenge today for the Christian church is not being subsumed by that culture, and in turn developing a distinctly Christian culture. Not a sub-culture which is easy and often done, but transforming the secular culture into a Christian one. That’s where the Mount Everest metaphor is apropos. As the tallest mountain in the world at 29,000 feet, for all but the most seasoned and expert climbers Everest is an insurmountable challenge. The culture can appear just as formidable given secularism has been the dominant plausibility structure in America since the 1960s. Plausibility structure is a phrase I’m confident you’ve never heard in church before, or even outside of it. Plausible is a word we are familiar with, “having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable.” It’s something that seems real or true. The structure is the culture in which we live, and the meanings the culture conveys in all its myriad ways will seem real or true to us. Whether these things are real and true or not is irrelevant, only that the culture makes them seem so.
At its most basic level, culture is whatever human beings create, but for our purposes culture is an amorphous set of influences. Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, states that, “culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations,” and that, “culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on.” Culture affirms certain values and propositions, while it denies others, it embraces certain beliefs, while it eschews others; culture is never neutral. Our modern concept of culture derives from a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator, Cicero: “cultura animi.” In Latin, cultura literally means cultivation. We could say culture cultivates. Culture is an indoctrination factory.
This seems obvious, but most people, including most Christians, don’t realize the extent that culture shapes not only what they believe, or what they like, or how they behave, but literally shapes who they are. If we don’t think in a discerning way about the culture we inhabit, we will be merely reactive rather than proactive. Culture is something we cannot take for granted or escape.
This sociological fact of human existence is why “the culture wars” are so important, and in fact crucial for obeying Christ’s injunction that his kingdom come, his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. If we don’t fight against the secular culture that influences us every moment as the water influences the fish, we will be determined by it. Even at that it can’t be fully escaped, but we can become aware of what it is communicating to us, how it is shaping us, and push back in any number of ways, including children. Having a large family is an act of cultural rebellion.
Creating A Marriage and Baby Culture in the Church
I started thinking about this when I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the connection between declining marriage rates and their correlation to the decline in the number of children couples are having. Chalk this up to the indoctrination of the secular culture of expressive individualism and personal fulfillment as “the chief end of man” (a la the Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q1). While conservative Christians have higher marriage rates and more children than secular couples, it’s not close to what it should be, at least in my humble opinion.
Then I read a piece in the New York Post by an American Jewish Woman with the click bait title, for me, “I took our six kids overseas — and saw a ‘family-friendly’ nation in joyous action.” I learned that prior to going to this “family-friendly” nation, they first spent a week in Greece, which is most definitely not “family-friendly.” She explains the differences in these two cultures and their people to their “large” family. I put the word large in quotes because I want to emphasize how rare six children in a family is today; it shouldn’t be, especially in the church. I encourage you to read the piece, but here’s how she starts:
If you’ve ever wanted to feel like a celebrity, turning heads everywhere you go, I recommend taking a gaggle of children to a country with a plunging birth rate. Across the European Union, birth rates are far below replacement level — and Greece is among the lowest, with the average woman having 1.3 children in her lifetime.
Touring it with six kids made me feel like I was traveling with a circus troupe. Everywhere we went, people stared. They counted the children aloud (I learned the number six in Greek, éxi, because I heard so many people tallying how many kids we had). They smiled politely and encouragingly, but with a kind of stunned disbelief.
Greece’s birth rate has collapsed so dramatically that a family like mine, once utterly normal, now looks like a moving museum exhibit.
America, if not quite there yet, is on its way. The birth rate currently is at 1.6, which is well below the 2.1 replacement rate. In other words. Women need to have over two children on average just to tread water. If that doesn’t happen, then in several decades that country will have some very serious problems, if it even exists as all.
Now let’s look at the country they next travelled to, and as she is Jewish you probably already guess that country is Israel, a nation where “large” families are not unusual.
Then we flew to Israel. It’s only a short hop on the map, but culturally it felt like crossing a continent. Suddenly, we weren’t an oddity: We were — wonderfully, refreshingly — unremarkable. In Israel, where the birth rate is not just stable but rising, a family with six kids isn’t an act of rebellion.
Walking around Jerusalem, no one turns to gawk because families with three to even eight children are everywhere. Babies in carriers, toddlers on shoulders, siblings zipping ahead on scooters; the streets are alive with them. This isn’t a place where children are squeezed into the seams of adult life. They are the fabric.
Oh how I love this! This should be like walking into a church on Sunday, children everywhere. I know, that’s not possible at all churches, but churches with a lot of young people should be a little Israel. How does this happen? How does a culture change, go from Greece to Israel regarding marriage and children? It starts from the Pastor and leadership of the church, that’s how. Since the secular culture mitigates against life and the sacrifices it takes to raise that life, conservative Christians culture should be radically counter cultural. This is not only because civilization is at stake in the current demographic crisis, but because God wills it!
Let’s see if we can make a biblical case for natalism. That word comes from a French word meaning birthrate, and simply means having lots of babies is good! It is in fact, a moral imperative. I know this will be “controversial” to some Christians who will immediately, in the toxic empathy that is endemic in our day, point to the poor couples who can’t have children and want to, or to single people who can’t seem to find a spouse. We don’t want to make them feel bad, but truth and blessing are no excuse to feel bad. If we do we should repent because God is the sovereign Lord of marriage and the womb, as he is the sovereign Lord of all of reality.
The Biblical Case for Having Children
This case should not have to be made, but given the secular captivity of the church on this issue, it must be. There are only three express commands to have children in the Bible, the first in Genesis 1 from a passage most Christians are familiar with, but unfortunately ignore:
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
I recently did a post on the Dominion Mandate, so I won’t repeat what I said there, but this command was not abrogated after the fall, or after Christ. This is the NIV, and other versions translate it as, “Be fruitful and multiply.” After the flood and before God’s covenant promise in the rainbow to Noah and his sons, he twice commanded them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth” (Gen. 9:1), and “As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it” (Gen. 9:7). The only other place where a command to have children is found is to the exiles in Babylon (Jer. 29:6):
Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.
The reason these are the only direct commands in Scripture to have children is that nobody would have conceived of a need to be commanded to have children, and as many as one could. That’s what families did! And to think otherwise would never have occurred to anyone in the ancient world. While industrialization diminished the incentives to have large families, until feminism, and especially until the dreaded 1960s, having children was seen as fulfilling and natural, not a burden to keep people from living their best life now.
Contrary to our current historical moment, I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and became an adult in the 80s, when the environmental hysteria de jure was overpopulation. Masses of people were supposed to die of starvation by the 80s, and the overpopulation predictions proved to be the lie they always were. God would never have created a world that could not sustain the apex of his creation. I even had Christians over the years argue that God’s command to Adam and Eve no longer applies to us because the earth is pretty much already filled up. Nobody would say such a thing now. In fact, I see Elon Musk on Twitter/X posting all the time about the demographic apocalypse that will happen if people don’t start having more children.
The promises of God in the Pentateuch are the foundation of God’s redemptive plans on earth, and they always included children. If we do a Bible word search for words such as offspring, seed, child, we’ll see that children are integral to everything God does with and for His people, and more children was always better than fewer. And in the first Christian sermon by Peter in Acts 2, he affirms the centrality of children to his redemptive plans in the New Covenant, as he says to the three thousand people assembled, “the promise is for you and for your children.” Children are assumed as part of the deal. They are not a burden, they are not an inconvenience, they are to be a natural part of Christian families and God’s church, the more the better. My prayer is that we become more like Israel so we don’t become like Greece.
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