Get Married, Have Children

by on September 21, 2026 | Comment

In the tumultuous years of the late 1960s and early 70s, in the midst of the Vietnam War, it became a truism among the young people that the world was a too polluted, too violent, and too dangerous place in which to bring children. Behind this thinking was the fear of overpopulation that had become so widespread in the 1960s.1 Behind the fear of overpopulation, which turned out to be unfounded hysteria, was the theory promulgated by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), which prepared the way for Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) theory of natural selection. Malthus worried that the world would become overpopulated, which would lead to future scarcity, disease, and other problems. The reigning assumption of his theory and that of Erlich and others was that the stuff of this world is a zero-sum game—that is, if someone accumulates goods or wealth, someone else has lost goods or wealth.

The Baby Bust

Remarkably, despite the concurrent prosperity and population boom the developed world has experienced in the post–World War II period, the Malthusian assumptions persist in 2026. There is evidence of a growing reluctance among young people to get married and to have children. Wendy Wang writes, “The U.S. fertility rate has been falling quickly in the last decade or so, down from a replacement level of 2.1 children per woman to just 1.6 today. Like many developed countries, we too face a demographic crisis.”2

It is understandable that population growth dropped significantly during the Great Depression, but it is more difficult to understand when, despite the recent inflation, the nation is still prosperous.3

Why are potential parents hesitating to have children? “Yet some experts say that many of the factors that keep fence-sitters teetering—childhood trauma, financial challenges, political and environmental fears, paltry childcare options and parental leave policies, mental illness, attacks on reproductive freedom, and more—are reflections of a troubled society.”4

When in human history did young parents not face financial challenges? Europe experienced a “little ice age” from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries.5 Are parents not the primary agents of childcare? How do “attacks on reproductive freedom” (restrictions on abortion on demand) inhibit those who want to have children rather than murder them in utero? The incoherence of some of these concerns suggests deeper underlying confusion.

The Creational Pattern

Though like all people Christians make certain prudential judgments about when and where to have children, they should not think about this matter the way the culture has come to think about it.

Let us begin where God’s Word begins—in creation. For the prophets of scarcity and doom, the world is a zero-sum game: If I have an orange, that is an orange you can never have. The Christian may not think this way. The world is not a finite fruit basket over which we are all fighting until the last peach. The world is God’s creation, which he spoke into being. The world is not a closed shop but God’s theater and workspace. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). There was when the world was not. Everything that came into being did so through the same Word of God who became incarnate (John 1:3). The Lord formed the world (Gen 1:2). He separated the light from darkness (Gen 1:3). He separated the waters above from below (Gen 1:8). He ordained that the earth would be fruitful: “And God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.’ And it was so” (Gen 1:11). There is an order to creation according to the will and design of the sovereign Creator. The refrain of “and it was so” rings through the creation narrative. Fruitfulness is good. God says so: “The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:12; emphasis added). Fruitfulness is good. Creation is good. Birth is good. It is all part of God’s intended pattern, his design, his plan. The waters were created to host swarms of creatures (Gen 1:20). The sky was created to host creatures. That swarming, above and below, was good (Gen 1:21). The earth was designed to host animals, livestock, bugs, and all manner of creatures, some of which we are still discovering all these years later (Gen 1:24). They were all supposed to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:22).

The last creation, the highest creation, the pinnacle of the created orders was humanity, which was made in the image of their Creator:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen 1:26–28)

The creational pattern is one of realms and rulers, spheres and sovereigns; and the last and highest of these, under God, is humanity, which has the blessing of being the image bearer, the proximate (not ultimate) ruler of creation. Like the other creatures, however, we too are to be fruitful and multiply. It is right there in verse 28: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.”

This is part of the creational, natural, normative order. It is permanent. That order, that design did not expire with the fall of humanity into sin any more than the marriage pattern or the Sabbath pattern. Let us start with the Sabbath. Think of the prior six days of creation as a set of three building blocks. On the left are the realms, or the spheres. On the right are the rulers, or the sovereigns. In Genesis 2:1–2 we see that the seventh day is the day without parallel. There are three days of realms and three days of rulers, but on day 7 creation is done and the Lord rests, as it were. That day sits atop the other six boxes, so to speak. In Exodus 20:11, Scripture says, “In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” There the Sabbath pattern of working six days and resting on one day is grounded in the creational pattern. That six-and-one pattern is God’s basic, fundamental, natural design.

So it is with marriage. There is a creational order that is built into the nature of things:

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Gen 2:21–25)

Verse 24 is a key text for understanding the divine design for marriage and human fruitfulness: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” This is what humans are meant to do ordinarily. We work. We marry. We have children. We serve the Lord. We rest. This pattern is meant to continue until Christ returns.

There are some questions still to consider. What effect did the fall have on this pattern? Did sin change everything? What about grace? Does it fundamentally alter the creational pattern? These words are from the Old Testament—does the New Testament invalidate them? These are some of the issues we will take up in the next installment.

Notes

  1. E.g., Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books, 1968).
  2. Wendy Wang, “Why Americans Aren’t Getting Married and Having Kids—And How to Change That,” Institute for Family Studies (June 18, 2025).
  3. William R. Emmons, “U. S. Population Growth Slowing to a Crawl,” Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis (February 10, 2020).
  4. Anna Medaris, Americans Are Having Fewer Kids—If They Have Them at All,” American Psychological Association 55.5 (July 1, 2024).
  5. John P. Rafferty, “What Was the Little Ice Age?,” Britannica.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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    Post authored by:

  • R. Scott Clark
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    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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