Here’s a shocking tidbit that doesn’t get much news coverage: The world is not overpopulated. In fact, it is steadily and rapidly becoming underpopulated. In fact, the U.S. population is just barely at maintenance (that is, each adult replaces himself or herself). And this is mainly due to immigration. People just aren’t having many children.
Countries that we expect to be growing are contracting. Russia, China and India are below replacement, and Japan is in demographic free fall, its existence in peril in the next couple of centuries.
The reasons are complicated. While the heartbreak of infertility is complicated, there are plenty of non-medical reasons that birthrates are falling. Many young people are fearful, and not without reason, of the social and economic consequences of having children. Others, used to extramarital intimacy without having children, simply don’t consider the creation of new life a rewarding, expected part of the equation.
Some have also told me that the world is just too dangerous, and too full of dangerous people, to have kids of their own. I try to reassure them that life has always been dangerous — and that for things to work out, good people need to have children, too.
Western society has been so long conditioned to think of human beings as an environmental danger, and children as a costly burden, that we too easily forget that humans are meant to make more humans. It is how we survive and advance.
But more poignant, those new humans bear the image of God and are important for expressing His person on earth. Humans have work to do as they walk the earth, healing, comforting, creating, building, serving, loving, reproducing and worshiping.
When my wife and I were having our children and reached the staggering number four, people often expressed shock and even dismay that we would do such a crazy thing as have what is, by modern standards, a very large family. (Mind you, my father-in-law was one of 17, so we were slackers by comparison.)
But having children not only brought us delight, and connected us in unimaginable ways, it introduced into the world four people who are kind and good, smart and funny, and who I am confident will live out their God-granted callings on this earth. They are here, like all of us, to do eternally prepared work.
What better time to be reminded of the importance of having and raising children than now, when we celebrate not only the birth of Christ, but the ultimate redemption that small, inconvenient, helpless and needy child bore into the world and the kingdom He instituted.
In like manner, all of our children are miracles, and the wonders they institute are just waiting to explode onto the world — if only we have the courage to bring them into being.
Never forget: Society needs people, and God desires them.
Merry Christmas!