Is there no hope without children?
Will Jones, who has contributed to this blog in guest posts as well as comments, wrote an interesting and challenging piece on the political website Conservative Woman. The website describes its values as being "unashamedly those of faith, married family and nation-state", though it actually dissociates itself from a direct link with the Bourgeois party. Information technology is worth a wander circular even—or mayhap especially—if you don't share its values. There is zippo quite like reading good arguments from a signal of view you might not concord with to sharpen your own thinking.
Will's article was titled 'Without children, the future holds no hope' and in it he explores the consequences for Western societies of our plummeting birthrates.
England and Wales are now experiencing their everyman birth rates since records began 80 years ago. The Daily Mail quotes TCW's Kathy Gyngell saying it heralds a 'long-term refuse in numbers of babies' and is a 'social disaster'. She's non wrong.
Nascency rates have been in long term turn down since the stop of the post-war baby nail, plummeting equally the contraception-fuelled 1960s sexual revolution got under way. They rallied a petty in the 1980s boom years before returning to decline in the recession-hit 1990s.
Mass clearing under the Blair government in the 2000s saw a surge in births among foreign-born parents. But even with such births holding steady today at around 28 per cent, overall rates in 2022 have dropped to their lowest level yet, just 11.one alive births per ane,000 population. This is down from a baby-boom loftier of 18.5 per ane,000 population.
The new low represents a fertility rate of around 1.vii children per adult female – well below the replacement rate of 2.1. This means the dwelling population of the UK (rates are similar in Scotland and Northern Ireland) is failing, and the current increment in the UK population of around 390,000 per twelvemonth is entirely a upshot of cyberspace inward migration.
If you lot try and practice some sums, you will realise that, if immigrant communities take a much higher birthrate, and the national boilerplate is 1.7, so the birthrate for the historically indigenous role of the population is fifty-fifty lower, and fifty-fifty further from the 'replacement' rate.
Will goes on briefly to explore some of the social and economic consequences of this dynamic. For ane thing, countries with a highly developed welfare system demand a stable, replacement population and then that the young who are in work can financially back up the old and infirm. (The aforementioned is truthful in all cultures, but in a welfare state the personal, family unit organisation of this support is missing and thus the need is not and so straight obvious.) For some other, societies function well when there is a high degree of social cohesion—and substantial, rapid immigration, where migrant populations don't take fourth dimension, energy or motivation to integrate culturally, threatens this. Nosotros can see this happening in France, where members of former colonial countries were granted French citizenship, thus encouraging migration, and Germany, who opened the door to meaning migration under Angela Merkel. Her motivation, though widely seen as compassionate past other countries, actually appears to have been largely motivated by demographic concerns, equally Robert Peston pointed out some fourth dimension ago.
The ii relevant points (leaving bated moral ones) are that:
- the UK'south population is rising fast, whereas Germany's is falling fast;
- the dependency ratio (the proportion of expensive older people in the population relative to able-bodied, tax-generating workers) is rising much quicker in Germany than in the Great britain.
So to put it another way, it is arguably particularly useful to Germany to have an influx of young grateful families from Syria or elsewhere, who may well be keen to toil and strive to rebuild their lives and prove to their hosts that they are not a brunt – in the style that successive immigrant waves accept done all over the world (including Jews like my family in London's East End).
Ane of the claimed motivations for smaller family sizes (as Prince Harry and Meghan have commented) in the West is to reduce the overall human being population, which will in time reduce the ecology pressure of food production on the planet. But the belatedly Hans Rosling was fond of pointing out how futile that is; the global population is primarily growing at the moment because people currently alive are living longer, and in that location is a population bulge left over in the transition of many countries from poverty to wealth, which is the primary thing that reduces family unit size. 'What do you want to do—impale them all?' he used to ask.
Will Jones points out that our electric current situation is the result of economic and political policy:
We are constantly told that we cannot use the tax and benefits system for social engineering science. But governments have been doing just that for the final 40 years to button women back to work. It has worked a treat. Never have more women been in work or more mothers in full-fourth dimension work.
It is worth noting that this motility alone has had a significant detrimental outcome on health, stress and family life, because of the housing market. Considering business firm prices more often than not reverberate supply and need (rather than primarily reflecting the costs of building), and so as more than families accept shifted to have two adults earning, house prices take moved to become a multiple of two incomes where previously they were the same multiple ofone income. As a result, housing has simply become less affordable for everyone. The move from 1-income families to ii-income families is more than or less a one-style ratchet.
And the emphasis on women staying in work, rather than being total-fourth dimension parents, is a reflection of political values across Europe, as another article on TCW points out:
To spell it out, the EU is run and controlled by political leaders of whom the majority have no children. This is not a gender issue. Neither Theresa May nor Chancellor Angela Merkel has children but then neither do President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni of Italia, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven of Sweden, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Republic of austria or Prime Minister Xavier Bettel of Luxembourg…
OK, I hear you lot say, there are still many European union countries where this is non the case – Poland, Hungary, Portugal and Spain to name merely some. But add in Scotland's Nicola Sturgeon and Ireland'due south Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, neither of whom accept children either, and you go far at a startling finding. It is this: of a total European union population of 510 million, 310 million are living in countries that have leaders who are childless…
Possibly information technology'south not surprising that rather than address population decline through family and child policy reforms, this group of politicians is tolerating, if non promoting, a population replacement policy through migration.
Given that this approach is, one way or some other, going to lead to some serious political, economical and social consequences, it is remarkable that debate on this question (the importance of parenting, childbirth and child-rearing) has been pushed to the margins—along with whatsoever balanced ethical debate virtually abortion, which is at present at it highest levels ever in the UK. It feels every bit though, in the mainstream discourse in our culture, to suggest that parenting and family life might actually be an of import part of our national, political and economic life is to chance being labelled every bit 'correct wing' and 'reactionary' despite the importance of the effect for national life in simply one generation's time.
This is, in part, a reflection of the brusque-term nature of our political argue. Simply it is also because of the prepare of values and behavior that underlie these political and economic approaches, which TCW articles repeatedly label 'feminism'. Thus Volition Jones comments:
For this birth pass up societal expiry wish to be stopped iii things need to happen:…
The third is a cultural shift in attitude that starts to recognise the deep damage and disruption to family life and happiness bound upwardly in reproduction that is caused by feminism. In that location is null shameful in choosing homemaking every bit an occupation; there is nothing incorrect about having marriage and children every bit a prime number goal in life; there is all to be proud of for a woman to prioritise or focus on her homemaking and nurturing function. It is what many women desire – most mothers want more hours at home and fewer at piece of work, and if they tin can they practice. Nor is at that place anything demeaning well-nigh periods of financial dependency on a husband provider. That is what marriage is about: trust, love and commitment.
I think at that place are three issues around this kind of language. The start is that there is non only one thing called 'feminism', but rather unlike feminist movements with different convictions that sometimes conflict sharply with ane another. The second is that 'feminism' in the broad sense of the term has led to women and men being paid every bit for the same work—and I would find it difficult to argue against that! Information technology is a affair of basic justice. The third event is that this criticism of feminism will look to some equally though it is leading to the imposition of stereotypical sex roles, with the married man at work and the wife at home looking after children—an consequence to which I will render in a moment.
In fact, the detail conviction which TCW authors take upshot with is the idea that men and women are, to all intents and purposes, interchangeable as regards occupation, an thought that has also been adopted within Christian circles in relation to women and men in leadership. This is a quite distinct idea from the conventionalities that women and mencan fulfil the whole range of roles, in the church building and the world—it is the belief that they tin without whatever differentiation of interest or aptitude, and therefore this reality is non realised until we meetequal numbers of men and women in each and every role. (In reality, this goal his addressed quite selectively; I accept never yet seen a entrada for equal numbers of women and men in dustbin collection…!). A couple of years ago, I tackled this head-on with Steve Holmes, who is involved in Projection iii:28 which aims to seeequal numbersof women and men speakers on platforms at Christian conferences.
And here's the rub: if you recall women should be every bit represented in 1 sector of ministry, and yous recollect that involvement should be on the basis of competence (which combines giftedness, whatever that is, with experience), then women should accept every bit much experience equally men—and that implies, for the majority who are married with children, that men should exist equally involved in childcare and parenting equally women. And information technology probably means that y'all need to encounter parental roles as interchangeable. My problem is, I don't think I do. And at that place is a mass of evidence to say that this isn't the case.
It is impossible to suspension the connectedness between occupations (whether that be 'secular' or 'ministry') and bug around childbirth and parenting. This is the signal where debates both within and exterior the church tend to polarise: y'all either believe that men and women take fixed roles, probably set downwards in the Bible; or yous believe that women and men are interchangeable, and the only thing that prevents at that place existence equal numbers of both in every part is social prejudice. This squeezes our an of import middle position (the one that I hold): that there is nointrinsic bar to different roles for men and women, but that real sex deviation might mean that women and men cease up in dissimilar numbers in different roles. If you lot call up about it, this position is non proverb much more than equality of opportunity does not necessarily lead to equality of result.
Michael Biggs, associate professor of sociology at the Academy of Oxford, highlights the oddity of the thought of interchangeability, in the context of a quite different argument nigh sexuality:
The foundational premise for feminism is that every difference between males and females in attitudes and behavior is due to socialization: there are no socially relevant biological differences in a higher place the neck. Thus the same feminists who denounce male violence and sexual objectification besides endorse Cordelia Fine and Gina Rippon for arguing that there are no differences between female and male brains. There are some obvious problems with the premise. Why are humans the only mammalian species where evolution did not produce sexual differences in behavior? Why are some sex activity differences remarkably uniform across different cultures? For instance, men commit more than violence than women—every bit feminists themselves rightly emphasize—even though the overall level of violence varies greatly from one society to another.
Biggs goes on to note that, whilst this claim appeared to exist in the interests of women in undermining sex stereotypes and opening doors of opportunity, in the long run denying bodily difference has really harmed women'south interests:
My argument, in curt, is that since the 1970s feminists have been sawing off the branch on which they perched. By denying biological differences they inadvertently eroded the distinction between male and female, which now licenses a social movement [transgenderism] that undermines the interests of women and girls.
What does biblical theology have to say virtually this? Information technology is sometimes claimed that the creation narrative, in which God made humanity 'male and female person' in his image (Gen 1.27), offers an statement confronting the interchangeability of sex roles. I am non convinced that this is the case, since that was not the outcome within that civilisation, and sexual activity departure is simply causeless in biblical texts rather than argued for—our modern, Western cultural assumptions run confronting the values of just about every culture in every historic period prior to ours. Nor is it the case that the gospel is nearly union and parenting, as some have besides claimed. The gospel is nigh Jesus dying and rise for our sins!
Nevertheless, at that place is a consistent supposition in the biblical narrative that our bodies affair; nosotros are body-soul ('psycho-somatic') unities, not simply brains on sticks or souls trapped in a material world. The Christian hope is not that our souls or spirits escape our bodies to fly upwards to God in sky, only that nosotros will be raised bodily—and this actually has important implications for our bodiliness in the present historic period, and with that, sex divergence now and in the futurity. In that location is also a consistent assumption that, for near people, wedlock, having children, and raising them will be a normal and natural office of life—expressed in what Judaism takes as the get-go commandment, to 'be fruitful and multiply' (Gen 1.28).
This connects with the eye of Volition Jones' essay—and the department that I think is the most problematic. He notes not only the large-calibration social and economical issues around falling fertility, but also the personal touch on, especially on women:
On a personal level to have children is to have family unit, to give life to a new generation who volition survive you and have children of their ain. Grandparents, parents and children, brothers and sisters tin can turn to one another in times of celebration and times of crunch to share joys and challenges with one another, to laugh and to weep.
To lack family unit is to take chances existence alone. To accept no children is to have no one to spotter grow up, to exist there for, to treat. To have just one kid – better than none, to exist sure – is to give a child no brother or sister to grow up with and learn life with…
How have nosotros arrived at this drastic and nihilistic situation? One of the master reasons for the decline in births is the determination of women (or the determination taken for women) to prioritise their careers. Sexual activity and the City author Candace Bushnell has recently spoken of her regret at choosing her career over children, saying that at lx she was now 'truly alone'. 'I practice see that people with children have an ballast in a way that people who have no kids don't,' she said.
There might exist some tough realities beingness faced here—merely on its ain I wonder what that says to the many people in our congregations who are single or childless for all sorts of reasons? And what does information technology say to those who experience God has chosen them to be single, for the sake of fruitful ministry? Alongside God'southward commandment in creation to 'be fruitful and multiply' through matrimony and raising children (which also contributes to biological growth of the people of God), we besides need to concur on to the commandment in the new creation to 'be fruitful and multiply' by sharing the new nascence through baptism that is found in Jesus' death and resurrection. If we don't, we are ignoring the near obvious foundational demographic of the Christian faith: that both Jesus and Paul were single and childless! That is why (in one case once again) I love the slogan of the Engage Network:
The Bible values singleness and marriage. Unmarried people are equally valuable and competent as married people. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, God'southward design from the beginning has been for marriage to reflect his covenant relationship with the church, to be foundational to society, and to exist personal experienced by almost people.
Unless we tin can say this of import second thing, I don't see how we are in a position to say the offset, of import thing that Will Jones highlights. Both demand to spoken prophetically into a civilization which (ironically) struggles to accept bodily difference. As a culture, to ignore the next generation past setting ourselves against the priority of children and family is to reject promise. But personally, hope is to be constitute in Jesus, who makes united states fruitful both with and without having children.
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