Faith & Family Ties

Can a Healthy Society Have One Without the Other?

Controversial Hungarian Prime Minister ­Viktor Orbán recently made global headlines yet again—this time for his bold plan to increase the Hungarian birthrate. The most prominent feature of the plan is to grant any Hungarian woman who gives birth to four or more children an exemption from income taxes for the rest of her life.

With a birthrate hovering around 1.5 children per woman (replacement level is 2.1), Hungary is among the lower-reproducing nations in the European Union. But no EU nation currently produces enough children to replace its own population without the help of immigrants, who generally have a higher birthrate.¹

Hungary is by no means the only country that has been seeking out creative ways of increasing its native birthrate in recent years. Italy's proclamation of a "fertility day" in 2016 caused international furor, with feminists protesting that the government was interfering in people's private lives. Even more weirdly, in 2012 the government of Singapore (which has the lowest Total Fertility Rate in the world) partnered with mint-manufacturer Mentos to sponsor "National Night," when couples were euphemistically encouraged to let their "patriotism explode" and so increase the country's population. (The ad for "National Night" featured an artist rapping the words, "I'm a patriotic husband, you're my patriotic wife; let's do our civic duty and manufacture life."²) China recently made the historic move of abolishing its one-child-only policy in favor of aggressively encouraging couples to have a second child. The Nordic countries have long been known for their free daycare services, generous family-leave policies, and other state-subsidized measures to support working families with children.

Have such measures worked? Some have had limited success, but all of them have entailed making huge outlays to achieve only minimal gains, according to demographer Jonathan Last. Last refers to one econometric analysis which found that "for every 25 percent increase in natalist spending, society gets a 0.6 percent fertility increase in the short term, and only a 4 percent increase in the long run."³

The West's Loss of Faith

So why is it that government policies seem able to accomplish only so much and no more? Why do the most developed nations around the world—including all the European nations and the U.S.—have below-replacement fertility levels? The reasons are many and complex, but at the heart of the matter there lies, I believe, a collective loss of faith. Western civilization has done its best to shed the Judeo-Christian ethic and yet retain its historic identity. But it doesn't work that way. Victor Orbán is one who seems to understand this, and he has linked his policy moves to the need for "spiritual renewal" by the Hungarian people.

As a culture, we have discarded the Author of Life and heeded the author of lies. We've decided that marriage doesn't matter much—if that's your thing, it's okay, but it's hardly the bedrock of society—and sex is for pleasure and not for procreation, unless, of course, you just happen to want a baby. Any two people of either sex can "marry" and raise a family if they want to, and they can later dissolve that family if things don't work out as hoped, and no harm will be done to anyone—or so the line goes. And then we turn around, surprised, and wonder why living according to the new rules has turned out to do harm and not good. We are astonished to find that no one sees the point in having babies anymore.

Right now, what we have on a massive scale in the West is a loss of the will to live, stemming from the failure of our society to believe that life is good, that it is a gift from God. This is evident in both our liberal abortion laws and our failure to reproduce. Perhaps the most deeply ironic and tragic symbol of this culture of death was the illumination of the spire atop the One World Trade Center in pink to celebrate the passage of New York State's murderous new law last January. Among other things, this law now permits abortions to be done right up until the moment of birth. Meanwhile, the memorial at the base of the tower lists the names of eleven pregnant women who lost their lives on September 11, each name followed by the phrase, "and her unborn child." Life is valued only when we choose to value it. We are deeply, tragically confused.

Christian Fertility & Flourishing

Something like this has happened before in history, and it gives some insight into what may happen in the future. In The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark describes how Christianity, what he calls in the book's subtitle "the obscure, marginal Jesus movement," eventually triumphed and became the world's dominant civilization. One of the most important factors in Christianity's rise was the Christians' fertility; unlike the pagan Romans, they had babies and valued life. They obeyed God's law against killing children—in utero or outside—even as the civilizations around them were infamous for their practice of infanticide. Later, during the numerous plagues of the Middle Ages, Christians took care of each other, while pagans literally abandoned their loved ones to die by themselves. Christians lived while other societies gradually killed themselves off.

If we Christians can keep that up, if we can continue to reject the culture of death and embrace the One who gives life, our grandchildren may live to see the beginnings of another triumph of Christian civilization.

Notes
1. Patrick Kingsley, "Orbán Encourages Mothers in Hungary to Have 4 or More Babies," New York Times (Feb. 11, 2019): nytimes.com/2019/02/11/world/europe/orban-hungary-babies-mothers-population-immigration.html.
2. Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, "6 Creative Ways Countries Have Tried to Up Their Birth Rates," MentalFloss.com (May 11, 2016): https://mentalfloss.com/article/33485/6-creative-ways-countries-have-tried-their-birth-rates.
3. Jonathan V. Last, "Make Boomsa For the Motherland!" Slate (April 25, 2013): https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/can-a-country-boost-its-low-birth-rate-examples-from-around-the-world.html.