“Empty Churches Equal Empty Hearts and Empty Cradles”

By Terrence McKeegan, J.D. | July 12, 2011


MercatorNet has an important speech by Don Feder that was delivered at the recent Moscow Demography Summit.

While UN agencies continue to tell the world that the biggest problem is population growth, the reality is that demographic winter is upon not just most developed countries, but many developing countries as well.

Feder traces declining fertility to a loss in faith in God and therefore no optimism for a future beyond oneself.

The underlying causes of declining fertility are:

1. A loss of faith: Not so much the idea that God is dead as that He is irrelevant to our lives, that He has nothing to do with our destiny, and that the Bible is a collection of stories (alternately interesting, amusing and terrifying), rather than life’s operating manual.

2. Radical autonomy: In place of God, the deification of self – the worship of an individual’s desires and appetites.

If you believe you have no higher purpose on this earth than the pursuit of pleasure (self-gratification), you are led in one direction – one that ultimately leaves you lost in the forest, tired, cold and hungry, with wolves howling in the distance. If, on the other hand, you believe that you were put here not for self but for service (to fulfil a higher purpose), you will live quite differently.

To cite a very relevant example of how this works, there is a direct correlation between birth-rates and religious observance. In America, the states with the highest weekly church attendance also have the highest fertility.

Conversely, Europe is both the most secularized continent and the one with the lowest birth-rates. In the United States, we’re told that 47% attend religious services weekly, and the birth rate is 2.06 – slightly below replacement.

In Western Europe, weekly church attendance is only 5%. In the European Union, the birth-rate is 1.5 – well below a replacement-level birth-rate of 2.1. Empty churches equal empty hearts and empty cradles.

Let’s go back to those underlying causes of demographic winter. If you believe in God (not casually, but seriously) you behave one way. If you believe in nothing higher than yourself, you behave in another.

It all follows logically. If you believe in God, then you must believe in the family, which is divinely ordained. You must believe marriage is a covenant, not merely a contract between two people. You must understand that sex has a spiritual dimension, that it’s connected to the concept of holiness. Procreation must be seen as a commandment, not a life-style choice.

If you believe in yourself, first and foremost, then everything becomes a matter of choice. When, where and under what circumstances you have sexual relations is a personal decision. Whether or not you get married is a choice. Whether you keep your unborn child or kill it is a choice. Whether your life is focused on accumulating material possessions or caring for a family, which helps to assure humanity’s continuity, is a choice.

My point is not that childbearing is a grim obligation for the religious. An obligation it most certainly is. But it’s also life’s greatest joy. Going through life without children and grandchildren is like having a limb severed. (Besides, your Ferrari won’t cry at your funeral.) Ultimately, it’s about optimism versus pessimism.

Read the rest of Feder’s speech here.

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