The baby cried with hunger and Maria unwrapped her swaddled newborn (a girl!) in order to nurse. In the next room Giovanni beamed with pride. He could not stop smiling. It had been a while since he or anyone in the village had smiled. Neither he nor Maria had slept much for the past few days, and things were harder than they might have been with the death of their parents and grandparents. They did not have the help they once expected, but still the baby was such a beam of light in a dark time.

Dark indeed. So far, about a third of the village had died horribly. It was 1348 and about a third of the population of Europe was dead. One Italian city official reported to the regional authorities that they were stacking bodies in the street like lasagna. The people called it “the Great Mortality.” Historians would later call it the “Black Plague” because of the way the plague turned the victim’s skin black.¹

The amazing thing is that there were couples like Gio and Maria all over Europe. In what was one of the darkest periods in human history, when people died in numbers that history would not see again until World War II (and the mass murders committed by the Communists before and after the war), people continued to have babies. They did not say to themselves, “How can we bring a child into such a world?” One person, writing in Psychology Today, in 2015, reports that someone said to him at a party, “I wouldn’t want to bring a child into the world she’d inherit.”² Tragically, the author says,

The best argument I can make for optimism is that there are many more good than bad people and that technology is helping those good people to foil most of the bad, hopefully come up with cures for horrific diseases, and make our lives better. Just think of how much our lives have been improved merely by one piece of software: GoogleSearch.³

His list of horribles could be replicated in any year. Yet his attitude is remarkable. He was at a party, not in a concentration camp, when he heard those words. We live in what is objectively one of the most prosperous and comfortable periods in human history, when, despite the current inflationary spiral, even the poorest in the USA have access to decent food and shelter, air conditioning, and smart phones. Yet a significant percentage of people in the West have concluded that the world is now so dangerous that it is no longer safe to have children.⁴ This is remarkable since never has neo-natal health care been so advanced. Never have we known so much about the health of a child before he or she is delivered. Never has food been so abundant or poverty-relief programs so widely available. Despite the economic problems faced in the USA and elsewhere, unemployment is still relatively low. It is not the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl. The current administration is filling low-wage jobs by importing workers by the millions. During the Great Depression men would have been glad for a low-wage job.

More broadly, large numbers of Americans (and perhaps other Westerners) are afflicted with anxiety. “Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illnesses in the U.S. and affect over 40 million adults, or 19.1% of the population.”⁵ Jessica Booth writes, “Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is the most common anxiety disorder in the U.S. with 6.8 million adults affected. Young people are more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety than older adults, with nearly 50% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 reporting depressive disorder or anxiety symptoms.”⁶

One major proximate source of this anxiety, of course, is our recent experience with Covid, but along with that is the drumbeat of the environmentalist movement, that, despite the evidence to the contrary, there is a coming apocalypse. This way federal funding lies. Omnipresent social media plays a major role in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of young people. They struggle to see that the virtual world of digitally enhanced beautiful people is not real.

Behind all of this, however, is an intellectual project traceable to Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), a mathematician, Anglican clergyman, and economist, who, in his reaction to the radicalism of the French Revolution (and to Adam Smith) proposed two axioms: 1) “It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence,”⁷ and 2) “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.”⁸ The sum of these two is predictable: “This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.”⁹

Robert Mayhew explains:

Malthus was aware that with societal advance people had come to limit procreation by delaying marriage or by practicing sexual restraint within marriage, each of which actions would reduce fertility levels. He was also aware that families could seek to balance family size against standard of living, choosing to reduce the number of children they had to ensure their relative affluence.¹⁰

Some have made much of the fact that Malthus was a minister in the Church of England. Mayhew explains, however, that Malthus was educated by heterodox dissenters, including Unitarians.¹¹ Malthus was a rationalist, that is, he put human reason above all other authorities, and he thought of the world in mechanical terms. His was the age of the machine. The German philosopher G. F. W. Hegel (1770–1831) turned history itself into a kind of mystical machine. Charles Darwin (1809–82) would appropriate Malthus’ theory as would the Social Darwinists. For Malthus, the world is a zero-sum game. If you have it, I do not. Adam Smith’s (1723–90) idea of the “invisible hand” of the market and expanding wealth created by markets was much closer to a Christian idea of general providence than anything Malthus conceived, and yet Smith’s notion was, in my undergraduate education, mocked relentlessly in the political science department—as if the art of politics can ever be reduced to a science.

The Gios and Marias of the fourteenth century had babies despite the plague ravaging the globe because they believed in God. It is understandable that rationalists and pagans would think of the world as they do. The pagans have always been afraid that the gods are out to get them. Christians, however, know better. We know personally the God who spoke creation into existence and who personally upholds and governs all things. When we confess, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” We mean:

That the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who of nothing made heaven and earth with all that in them is, who likewise upholds and governs the same by his eternal counsel and providence, is for the sake of Christ, his Son, my God and my Father, in whom I so trust, as to have no doubt that He will provide me with all things necessary for body and soul; and further, that whatever evil he sends upon me in this vale of tears, he will turn to my good; for he is able to do it, being almighty God, and willing also, being a faithful Father. (Heidelberg Catechism 26)

The world is not a machine. Scarcity is not inevitable, and God has not gone to the corner for a beer. Christian, he loves you and your children. Have babies! They are a great blessing from the Lord. Covenant households are a wonder as God answers prayers and brings covenant children to new life, true faith, and leads them to a life of discipleship and vocation in his world whereby he is glorified and the church edified.

God is still at work. He still uses his image bearers to bring glory to himself by loving their neighbors. Who knows what the future will bring, but let the Christians be those who are not fearful but who trust their heavenly Father to provide them with everything necessary for body and soul. Let the pagans look and wonder at us, quietly turning the world upside down by having families, filling churches, and loving our neighbors until Christ returns.

Notes

1. For more on this period see, e.g., John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). I have not yet read it but James Belich, The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022) looks promising.
2. Marty Nemko, “‘I Don’t Want to Bring a Baby into This World.'” Psychology Today (December 29, 2015).
3. Nemko, “‘I Don’t Want to Bring a Baby into This World.'”
4. 5% of respondents in a Pew Research poll published November 19, 2021 say that they do not plan to have children because of climate change. Anna Brown, “Growing share of childless adults in U.S. don’t expect to ever have children,” Pew Research Center, November 19, 2021.
5. “Anxiety Disorders – Facts and Statistics,” Anxiety & Depression Association of America. Accessed 8/27/2024. Cited in Jessica Booth, “Anxiety Statistics And Facts,” Forbes Health, October 23, 2023.
6. “Latest Federal Data Show That Young People Are More Likely Than Older Adults to Be Experiencing Symptoms of Anxiety or Depression,” Kaiser Family Foundation. Cited in Booth, “Anxiety Statistics And Facts.”
7. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798), vii. Donald Winich, “Introduction,” T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Donald Winich, Cambridge Texts in The History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), viii, observes that Malthus first published this essay anonymously as a pamphlet.
8. Malthus, Essay, 4.
9. Malthus, Essay, 5.
10. Robert J. Mayhew, “Introduction. ‘Alps on Alps arise’: revising Malthus,” in Robert J. Mayhew ed., New Perspectives on Malthus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 4.
11. Mayhew, “Introduction,” viii.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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