In the tumultuous years of the late 1960s and early 70s, in the midst of the Vietnam War, it became a truism among 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
- E.g., Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books, 1968).
- Wendy Wang, “Why Americans Aren’t Getting Married and Having Kids—And How to Change That,” Institute for Family Studies (June 18, 2025).
- William R. Emmons, “U. S. Population Growth Slowing to a Crawl,” Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis (February 10, 2020).
- Anna Medaris, Americans Are Having Fewer Kids—If They Have Them at All,” American Psychological Association 55.5 (July 1, 2024).
- John P. Rafferty, “What Was the Little Ice Age?,” Britannica.
©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.
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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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Thanks for spending the time on this. My limited experience has been that young Christians are enthusiastically seeking marriage, but then perhaps delaying child bearing for the sinfully anxious reasons you described. I do think that we are living in a time of difficult economic times, inflation and housing has gone through the roof since covid and it makes it scarier to have children as opposed to if it was 1950 or 1983. But, as you seem to be saying, the economy is not a Christian reason to fear and not trust the Lord’s provision!
I’m bit confused by a response from RSC here. Is stating that marriage and children is a good, but not the (keyword) ultimate good really translate to grace destroying nature? That’s how the comment reads, but I have a hard time believing that’s the actual position. If marriage/children is a Christian’s “ultimate good” (rather than glorifying God & enjoying him forever, which can be done by anything at any of life’s stages), then this really is a fertility cult as someone mentioned. I’m assuming this comment wasn’t communicated as intended; otherwise it’s a clear rejection of Westminster.
JM,
I’m confused. I did not intend to say what you have me saying.
What I think and what I’m trying to say is that to say that the new covenant, and the inbreaking of the eschatological state, which was inaugurated in the new covenant, more or less cancels the creational mandate or the six and one pattern of work and rest or the creational pattern of marriage is a species of grace destroying nature.
My thesis is that American evangelical Christianity is unknowingly pervasively Anabaptist in its thinking. That many American Christians assume that grace destroys nature, that they have virtually no idea of a category of creation or nature. The evidence for this thesis is abundant.
That’s why I point to the Sabbath as an example. Few American Christians have any notion that the sabbath pattern is grounded in a creation and not the specifically Mosaic (and thus temporary) legislation.
Likewise, few American Christians think about marriage and children as a creational matter. They tend to think of them in either purely pragmatic or mostly sentimental categories.
I think some of the comments responding to this installment (more to come!) are assuming that I’m aiming primarily at the Reformed world. There is overlap, to be sure, between the evangelical/Anabaptist world and the Reformed but I think most of the problem lies in the broader evangelical world.
Recognizing and honoring creational patterns and divine institution is hardly a “fertility cult” any more than recognizing the sabbath pattern is a resting/worship “cult” (although, ironically, the Latin for worship is cultus). To say that suggests the influence of the Anabaptist reading of redemptive history and the Anabaptist understanding of nature and grace.
My argument is that we should both recognize the progress of redemptive history and the abiding validity of the creational/natural patterns and the natural law.
E.g., The Abiding Validity Of The Creational Law In Exhaustive Detail
A lot of the objections to Dr Clark’s post seem to be
1. “I’ve witnessed good things (marriage and children) being abused (e.g., failed marriages with many children).” But the abuse of a good thing is no reason to stop promoting it as something good.
2. “We shouldn’t promote something as good (marriage and children) because some people can’t obtain that good (e.g., singles and infertile couples) and it makes them feel bad.” All Scripture is profitable and should be expounded, including the parts that mention blessings that some people don’t have.
And then this surprising one:
3. “Marriage was the norm in the OT, an option in the NT, and non-existent in heaven.” Have we forgotten already about that widespread error before the Reformation – that remaining single is extra virtuous and should be encouraged?
Dr Clark, maybe in future articles you could discuss why the Reformed Baptist Confessions delete the phrase in the Westminster Confession, that one of the purposes of marriage was to provide the Church “with a holy seed?”
As you’ve stated elsewhere, American Christianity is largely anabaptist. It would be interesting to explore the long-term impact of their error of equating the children of believers with heathen children. I understand that in the Netherlands, Reformed Churches keep growing even when some of their children abandon the Church, because the average family sizes are so large.
I’m not Anabaptist – I’ve been Reformed all my life. If you want my bona fides, I was baptized by a contributor to this blog. I did not say remaining single was extra virtuous. I also refuse to believe that marriage and Duggaresque numbers of children is extra virtuous. I am simply trying to convince you to consider the creation mandate in the context of the rest of Scripture instead of misinterpreting one verse and using that as a proof text, which a pastor of my acquaintance recently did. I am trying to keep my personal story as much out of this as possible, but I have suffered very deeply at the hands of various well-meaning but clueless Christians due to my singleness and childlessness, to the point that it is only by the grace of God that I am still attending church.
Anon,
I understand that you’ve had bad experiences but you don’t seem to be arguing against what I’ve been arguing as much as what you’ve heard from others.
Okay, maybe I need to put it more plainly. Marriage is good, but it is not the ultimate good. The children of believing parents are holy, but that does not mean they are automatically saved.
People should take to heart, first and foremost, the commands in Scripture that are specifically addressed to them, rather than spending their energy complaining that other people aren’t keeping the commands given to them.
God cares about the poor, the foreigner, the eunuch, and others who are vulnerable or marginalized just as much as He cares about the most “pure-blooded,” multigenerational Christian family with ten children. Christians are called to care about these people as well—to welcome them, serve them, and treat them with dignity, rather than battening down the hatches and looking down on those who are less privileged than themselves.
Do we understand each other now?
Anon,
So, in your view, grace really does wipe out nature?
Anonymous,
Dr Clark is a minister of the gospel and it is his duty to tell people what the Bible says is good. Ministers are also supposed to reprove people for not keeping God’s commandments. It is quite a swipe to call this “spending their energy complaining that other people aren’t keeping the commands given to them.”
We heartily agree with you that the Church should care for the “poor, the foreigner, the eunuch, and others who are vulnerable or marginalized.” But you need people to do that – and if it’s a third world country, you often need young, able bodied people. So young Christian couples should have children who will some day, by God’s grace, be able to help those people.
So even though I spend my days in the inner city helping children who are poor, foreigners, homeless, disabled, etc., I am not keeping God’s commandments because I am single and childless? I am the person who is actually doing this work, and you look down on me because you can only see one thing the Bible says is good and are not listening to any of the other commandments in the Bible. I’ve literally had a student eye my flashcards and wonder out loud how much she could get for them if she stole them. I could go on at length. I live in a world that your average middle-to-upper-class educated Reformed person has no idea exists and am actually doing something about it. But I get blamed because I don’t fit the Reformed culture well enough, and if I brought anybody I work with to church they would be similarly blamed instead of reached with the gospel. Everything I have said, other than my view on creation, I would think is pretty uncontroversial stuff, but you are treating me like I’m the crazy one. I never denied the existence of nature. I’m seeking marriage and kids and in a relationship in the hope that this one works out. I really don’t understand where all the judgment is coming from.
The core disagreement is that Clark’s message is preached in countless Reformed churches every Sunday. I’m skeptical that American demographics connects to Anabaptists, but even if that were the case, Anabaptists don’t read the Heidelblog. Reformed Christian do. You can yell “get married & have kids!” from the rooftop & it won’t change anything, especially when your audience already agrees. Visit Reformed churches. Youth are either married or looking for marriage, but demonizing single who’ve been unsuccessful in finding a mate doesn’t help anything.
Brian,
Who is demonizing single people or people without children? Where have I done so? Honestly, can you quote a single passage or a single sentence where I’ve done so? I’ll happily revise it. That’s not my intention at all.
There are two more installments to this series. I’m going to address these issues. I can’t say everything all at once and if I did, no one would read it.
Anon,
As I’m going to say in a following installment, singleness and even childlessness is an honorable estate. If God has called you to that condition, then you should serve him in that condition to his glory and to the edification of the church.
Our Lord did speak of eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom.
But there is a general pattern. There are creational norms, and it’s that general pattern and those norms to which I’m calling attention.
I would, do, and have write about marriage and the Sabbath the same way. There is a six and one work and rest pattern.
Marriage is between and man and a woman and they become one flesh. That’s another creational norm and pattern.
It doesn’t mean that there are not exceptions. Paul speaks to those exceptions explicitly in 1 Corinthians and so will I.
I’m glad for your work with the poor and the suffering. I have a little more experience with that world than you might assume.
My reading and life experience tell me that most American Christians, however, don’t grasp the concept of natural, creational patterns. Most American Christians are functionally Anabaptist in the way they think about nature and grace. I was one of those and I wasn’t alone. I’m not saying that you are necessarily but could also be that you’re influenced by ideas and ways of thinking of which you’re unaware? It happens to all of us. It certainly happened to me. I was much affected in the 1970s and 80s by Malthusian ideas and by Erlich and others. I also thought that until about 1990 that the Great Commission had more or less replaced the creational pattern. I came to see, gradually, through the 90s and into the 2000s that I was wrong, that I had adopted a wrong view of nature and grace.
I wasn’t born thinking about Christ’s twofold kingdom. I read it in Calvin but I didn’t understand or adopt it for probably 20 years. Again, I don’t think I was alone in thinking the way I did.
If your take is honestly “Reformed youth aren’t getting married and having children because we aren’t telling them to, and they have Malthusian assumptions” then yes, you’re demonizing them. Talk to the single person at your church. In all likelihood they want to get married and have children. Making these accusations against them isn’t right. They belong to the body of Christ, and they should be deemed a lesser Christian just because they haven’t found someone yet.
Brian,
As I just wrote to JM, there’s some overlap between the broader evangelical (largely Anabaptist in its thinking) world and the Reformed (e.g., the NAPARC world) I wasn’t thinking particularly of the Reformed world when I wrote this series.
I’ve been teaching young people from a variety of backgrounds for 31 years and so I see and hear how they are thinking about the world and their place in it. I read what evangelicals and thinking and I know what I myself thought for a long time (most of twenty years).
It’s not demonizing of people to asking them to question their assumptions. I didn’t question my own assumptions about things until I read things that made me question them.
Thinking critically about what is true and what isn’t and about pervasive cultural assumptions isn’t demonizing. It’s a Christian duty. We all have to do. It’s part of the mortification of sin in all of us, myself included.
When I was a kid unbelievers were afraid Reagan would start a nuclear war and believers were drilled with Rapture readiness. There were a lot of non-Malthusian reasons people felt there was maybe little point in marrying or having children. The locus of the dread may change from nuclear war in the 1980s of my youth to anthropogenic climate change in the 2020s (and, yet again, fearing a Republican POTUS will launch the nukes), but there’s nothing especially Malthusian about ordinary American reticence. It’s possible there’s a gap between the reasons people in think-tanks THINK people are putting off marriage and concrete reasons the men and women on the street may have; people who are looking at housing and medical costs, or hearing about punitive divorce proceedings among their peers, and doubt that any of the alleged rewards outweigh the risks. I know someone who was afraid to have kids because of a Y2K bug who has since had 9 kids and could laugh about the absurdity of the previous fear, but that person shared that a fear that seems silly decades later looks very serious at the time you have it.
I don’t think there’s anything bad about starting with the idea that marriage and child-rearing are goods, but I do think that the reality is that probably no one among ordinary Christians would have even tacitly Malthusian reasons for reticence about marriage and family.
This is a correct take. Right or wrong, these panics aren’t Malthusian. Words have meaning, and we should twist them for rhetoric or polemical utility.
Wenatchee,
Malthus set a pattern which has continued. People are still thinking in broadly Malthusian terms. Whether it’s “the bomb” or “climate change” or “economic uncertainty” people are always going to find a reason why the world is too scary right now to have children.
The world has always been scary.
Eve’s first son murdered her second son. They didn’t give up having children because of sin and its effects. They grieved, their buried their son and they had more children.
Adam and Eve definitely had no Malthusian concerns. Even if you want to frame Malthus’ ideas negatively, giving some historical context for why he made his claims and, more particularly, whose ideas he may have been trying to argue against, might be helpful. I’ve read in the last year or so that Malthus was actually attempting to argue against Comte style positivist optimism by arguing that humans are not so inventive as to be able to overcome limits in human agricultural capacity. Malthus turned out to be wrong, but Malthus, in the long run, remains irrelevant to the creation mandate and is a useful bugbear for figures like Mark Driscoll (self-identified in the vein of Doug Wilson).
In other words, the problem with framing the creation mandate regarding marriage in terms of a rebuttal to Malthus straight out the gate is that it risks misframing the good you are attempting to argue for in light of a person whose views are not even given any historical or cultural context. Malthus was arguably as wrong in the long run as I suspect Christian Nationalists will turn out to be, but Malthus’ ideas could at least be given a bit of a frame. As Neville Figgis put it about divine right of kings, saying that there are sufficient causes to explain how someone got idea X is not the same as saying those reasons were good reasons, his example was to point out that divine right of kings was defended for reasons that seem dumb to moderns but they are completely explicable if you understand the framework within which divine right of kings was formulated as a doctrine of sovereignty that was an alternative theory of sovereignty to papal infallibility as applied to European geopolitics. Malthus’ misstep might need a comparable framing if you’re going to go to the trouble of invoking his ideas at all.
As it stands, to go back to Adam and Eve opens up the possibility that the Malthusian lead remains a red herring.
Wenatchee,
I don’t see how Driscoll and Wilson have anything to do with what I’m saying. I didn’t learn what I’m writing from them. Indeed, I think they are still Anabaptist in their thinking in a number of areas. I don’t think either one understands nature/grace in a Reformed way.
You seem to be of two minds about Malthus. You want to deny his affect on modern thinking and you want to rehabilitate him.
By contrast, I think his program is not compatible with a Christian understanding of the nature of things as God has ordered the world.
As I wrote earlier, I don’t think you have a case that Malthus’ ideas have any clear salience to why contemporary Christians hesitate to marry and have kids.
Connecting dots briefly from Malthus to Darwin to liberal anxiety about population size was something Driscoll already did years ago. Whether you know he did or not wasn’t the point of my observation, I’m pointing out that you’ve deployed Malthus as the originator of an idea Christians should reject in favor of marrying and having kids and, in so doing, replicated something Driscoll did circa 2021.
As it stands, I am still not convinced Malthus weighs as much in laity worries as more obvious concerns.
I didn’t see an option to respond to RSC’s response, so I’m doing it here. I’m not against creation norms, and I think pretty much everyone in churches (especially conservative ones, but even secular spaces) desires marriage and children and sees this as a good thing. That’s why I find these articles puzzling. It’s shadow boxing. There’s a consensus on the creation mandate and both theological and utilitarian arguments for marriage/children on uncontested in our spaces. Kids raised in Reformed spaces are continually taught that it’s their Christian duty (1st and foremost) to marry and reproduce. It’s how we teach Reformed youth to honor God. I’ve seen this across multiple NAPARC denominations and across diverse geographies. Why have a hyper focus on this specific application of the creation mandate? Are parents super-Christians compared to singles? Are singles lesser Christians? In most cases no one would come out and say this, but it’s the actual position within our communities, and if you doubt me, talk to singles, especially once they enter the late 20s and beyond (and its even worse for women because they are categorized as feminists or childless “cat-ladies” to quote our vice president).
Brian,
I gave evidence at the beginning of the article that suggests that I’m not shadow boxing. The very fact that Anon resorted “natalism” also suggests that I’m not shadow boxing.
There is a definite resistance among young couples, including Christian couples, to getting married and having babies. The statistical trends are clear. Increasingly even “conservative” Christian young people are putting marriage and deciding not have children.
So, we’re at loggerheads here as to what is really happing.
If there wasn’t evidence of an issue, I wouldn’t have raised it here.
There may be a consensus among pastors and elders in NAPARC but is there a consensus among the people? I suspect not.
I suppose we do have a fundamental disagreement then. From what you claimed/cited, I don’t see evidence for your argument, but it is comforting for us Reformed folk to point to the “world” and claim that feminism/malthusianism/Darwinism/secularism (or whatever scary “ism”) is the root of our problems, including demographic decline. It allows us to point the finger at abstractions and everyone’s favorite enemies rather than grapple with the harder questions. Moreover, demographic concerns is a major factor behind the pull towards CREC/Doug Wilson and other seemingly surging movements like Christian Nationalism and postliberalism. Even some leftwing talking heads have started addressing falling fertility rates. Clergy and laity across NAPARC preach this constantly. Blaming liberals while conservative singles struggle only dehumanizes them. This also extends to couples who struggle with infertility. They’re viewed with suspicion and are deemed lesser Christians. Few come out and say it (even though it does happen!), but it’s certainly reflects how singles and childless couples are treated. You mean well, but this only adds to the problem. Since I’ve spoken my mind, I’ll leave this be. Blessings.
Brian,
You don’t see the evidence? Really? Did you read the article and footnotes? Did you read the footnoted articles? It’s not exhaustive but there’s tons of evidence out that Gen-Zs are not having children because, in effect, they think they’re too poor and the world is too bad. It’s 1972 all over again.
This is only part 1! There are two more parts to come! Of course not everyone can have children. Does that mean that I can’t talk about the norm?
I’m a little surprised at the response by some people to looking at Genesis 1.
Yes, I’ve read the data you’ve cited, and it’s at best one of many factors. For those of us who’ve grown up in Reformed communities, we’ve been hearing about this our entire lives! You have a legitimate point about Zoomers saying that they’re too poor to have children, but this is more of a talking point than an actual real explanation when you dig deeper into the data. I think people are responding negatively because what’s I’ve described is true to their experience. You can preach countless sermons about marriage/children, listen to numerous podcasts about demographic decline, or attend many conferences/seminars about fertility and it won’t change a thing. We’ve been banging this drum for decades, and look at what it’s produced. It’s not only proven ineffective, but it’s also othered singles and couples struggling with fertility. How we’ve treated these groups is a major stain on our churches. I could say more and give more specifics, but I’ve expressed my opinion. God bless.
As someone who has been single in the church for over a decade and is finally in a relationship as of recently, it is very disheartening to see the current push for natalism, which completely disregards Paul’s teaching on singleness as a good which can be used to benefit the church. It isn’t that I didn’t try to find a spouse during that time, but there is a shortage of likeminded options and nothing came even close to working out previously. My current relationship was worth the wait. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to the pressure to just marry the first person of the opposite sex who expressed interest and make a ton of babies just to be divorced and left dealing with 10 kids once we realized what a bad decision that was. “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases.”
I recently heard a pastor of an average Reformed church claim that if you don’t have at least 3 kids, you aren’t multiplying. When I challenged him on this, he claimed this was just basic theology he learned from his seminary professor and wouldn’t back down. Natalism is just a new form of legalism, a new way of saying “I’m holier than you are because I have more kids.” As someone who is a little older, this is just cruel. How many important couples in the Bible had difficulty having kids, maybe even tried to take things into their own hands instead of trusting God, which of course went badly, and finally had the child of promise after waiting many years?
Dear Anon,
This is part 1 of a series. I address some of your concerns later on. In this part I needed to respond to the pervasive Malthusian assumptions that have had such a terrible effect on even Christians.
I am struck by your use of the the pejorative “natalism.” Can you defend your use of that noun from Scripture or a Christian perspective?
I will get to wisdom and prudence in part 3 of this series. There are necessarily prudential judgments to made. It seems to me that you may be reacting to other things you’ve heard and read. You don’t seem to be interacting with what I wrote here.
To ease your concerns, no I don’t think that the general mandate to marry and have children necessitates that one marry just anyone. In my view, the decision when or whether to have children is a matter of Christian liberty but as believers we all have to deal in good faith with what Scripture says and that’s what I’m trying to do here.
I agree that we have to trust God! Amen.
Natalism is the word being used to describe the current zeitgeist. I didn’t make it up, but I feel it is very accurate to what I am seeing right now in my circles (see anecdotal evidence above).
I am a layperson and by no means an expert in any of this. However, I did spend some time over the past year or two studying Genesis and trying to reconcile faith and science. I have a background in classical literature, and I have personal experience as an older single. In other words, I have read some things and put some puzzle pieces together in my own head, maybe incorrectly in whole or in part but here we go.
I connect the command to be fruitful and multiply to the Great Commission. I have been criticized for this because the Great Commission is for the church and Genesis 1:28 is for all mankind, according to conventional understandings.
It does seem strange to me that the Reformed church in general is putting so much emphasis on a command for all mankind instead of a command specific to the church itself. However, I would argue, based in part on some recent interpretations of Genesis, that Adam is placed in the garden in a special role as a priest/king without necessarily being the only person in the world (reconciling the archaeological record and difficult pieces of Scripture such as who Cain was afraid of and who lived in that city he founded). He has the image of God. Therefore, the command to fill the earth and subdue it etc. would be similar to the Great Commission in that humanity is to spread the image of God throughout the world as God’s representatives, cultivating and ordering creation in dependence upon him.
Adam failed to represent God in his failure to overcome the serpent. However, Genesis continues with plenty of lists of people having babies. Does that automatically spread the image of God throughout the earth? No! Instead, we see multiplication without righteousness, civilization accompanied by violence, and technological achievement used to magnify themselves rather than honor their Creator. The issue is not merely whether the earth is filled, but with what kind of people and under whose authority. Simply making babies is not the solution, and there are plenty of anecdotal examples of kids from Christian homes who left the faith as adults no matter what kind of upbringing and education they had, so you can’t just count on that to grow the church.
In Abraham, God provides a miracle child with which all the nations will be blessed. God could have given Abraham 20 kids who each had 20 kids etc. But that is not how God actually works if you actually read the Bible instead of nonsense online. Similarly, we should raise our kids to be a blessing to others, just as the elder brother should have searched out the younger brother, instead of trying to fight the culture wars by having lots of kids and keeping them so disconnected from the world that they can’t share the gospel to the world.
I could go on with similar examples from Scripture but that is long enough.
Anon,
I understand whence “natalism,” but it strikes me as an anti-biblical pejorative. After all, when God says, “be fruitful and multiply,” doesn’t make him a natalist? It’s not a very helpful category of analysis.
It’s like Father’s Day. Yes, there bad fathers, absent fathers, abusive fathers but that reality, of which the biblical writers were well aware (sin wasn’t invented in our time), didn’t prevent the writer to the Hebrews from writing:
Decent, caring fathers are the norm.
Likewise, there are creational norms. The norm is that heterosexual couples marry and have babies. To an alarming degree, young people are not having babies for bad reasons. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good reasons for not having babies.
I’m trying help re-set the baseline expectation.
As I said, this is part 1 of a 3-part series. I address the relationship between the creational mandate and the Great Commission. You’ll have to wait for that. I understand from where you are coming and I’m glad you’re responding because I wrote this piece to address the concerns/objections you’re raising.
I wish you would go back and re-read what I wrote a little more slowly and patiently.
Here’s a fundamental question: Are there persistent creational norms? Is there such a category as nature along with grace or does grace wipe out nature? These are really important questions.
Thanks for reading.
Anon is right. Many conservative Christians have become fertility cults. Getting married and having Christian should be the norm for most people, but endless preaching “get married and have kids” isn’t helpful. Most people would like to do this (even secular folks!), but for many reasons it’s incredibly difficult in today’s age to find someone. Othering singles isn’t helping. In fact, it drives people away from the church.
Hi Brian,
A sound preaching ministry should be faithful to the text and to whole of Scripture.
Recovering creational norms isn’t a fertility cult is it? As I said to Anon, isn’t God a “natalist”? Didn’t he say to and about human beings, “be fruitful and multiply”? It’s in the Bible.
Malthus and Erlich were demonstrably wrong.
I’ve been in the church since 1976 and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sermon on this topic. I believe you when you say that some preachers are harping on this but that’s not why I wrote the article. I did it to try to help be recover some basic biblical doctrines.
How is addressing what you describe as a norm “othering”? As I wrote to Anon, does the fact of abusive fathers mean that we can’t quote Hebrews about fathers?
Sin doesn’t wipe out creational norms and neither does grace.
I agree that it’s difficult to find a spouse today. I have two children and I’ve been teaching young people for 31 years. I’ve seen the struggle. I’ve prayed and counseled with them about it. I plan to address that after this series but it’s good to start at the beginning, don’t you think?
your article has made some very good points and that having children is a natural biological thing that God put in all of mankind. But mankind is imperfect and some people should not have children. There are Christians deciding not to have children due to mental or physical issues or they could pass on some serious health issues that would put the whole family into crisis and financial drain. The church should not put guilt on them for that.
Deciding not to have children or to limit how many is not a sin. even though the patriarchal/complementarian church will trot out some vague verses and say it is sin not to have children.
But God also gave us brains, and choice to think about how many children, if any, and to space them in a way that is best for the mother. The patriarchal/ complementarian church has gone the other way–they teach that God wants married couples not to use birth control and have as many as they can because they are all a blessing which has led to hardship in the family. living in crowded trailers, little money for food and paying the bills, the wear and tear on the mother’s body. and sometimes the father desserting the whole family, leaving the entire burden on the mother….Then the kids grow up and having lived in such misery decide against being Christian or the mom has had such misery she too gives up God so she can get some physical and mental rest.
Instead the church should teach, that each couple is a unique set of situations and that each couple should weigh in all the factors to prayerfully decide if and when and how many kids they should have and to follow God’s leading for their life.
Yes, accidents happen and children are born with serious health issues, but that allows God to bring grace and work in their life in those situations. God does not make cookie cutter Christians.
Perricone,
I will get to exceptions later in the series but we have to start somewhere and Genesis 1 is a pretty good place to start.
Lots of us were born into poverty. The Lord is merciful. Growing up wealthy (the other extreme), about which I know very little, doesn’t seem to be all it’s cracked up to be.
Sin affects everything in this life but that doesn’t destroy the creational pattern, as I argued in this installment.
Actually, I have greatly appreciated your emphasis on nature as a category. However, I feel that a lot of Christians read the first chapters of Genesis and stop there. “Ok, 24/7 creation and get married and make babies. Got it!” There is the entire rest of the Bible to help interpret those chapters in context.
I read somewhere once something along the lines that marriage as we know it was instituted at creation, was the norm under the Old Covenant, became optional under the New Covenant, and will have no place in heaven. Is it possible that marriage is passing away?
I mean, the majority of the New Testament is either by or about single people. How do you deal with Paul on singleness? How do you deal with the fact that a lot of single people, Christian or not, want to get married and have kids but can’t find the right person? Or that housing costs have skyrocketed? (Covid didn’t help anything, that’s for sure.) I know some single guys who have a lot of difficulty holding down a job, which doesn’t help their prospects either. I work with homeless kids and would never recommend having kids without resources to support them. Are these things that can be resolved with a blog article blaming singles for things outside their control?