Faith & Fertility

By R.R. Reno
Monday, January 26, 2009

With fertility rates dipping to almost one child per woman in Spain and other European countries, it’s hard to even imagine the future. Who will work and pay all those retirement benefits to the current and larger generation of workers? How can societies with declining populations maintain a robust, confident cultural outlook? Will European demographic suicide turn the continent over to Islamic domination, as Mark Steyn and others darkly foresee?

But why the demographic suicide? In The Cube and the Cathedral, George Weigel offers an explanation. “There are,” he writes, “economic, sociological, psychological, and even ideological reasons why Europe’s birthrates have fallen below replacement level for decades. But the failure to create a human future in the most elemental sense—by creating a successor generation—is surely an expression of a broader failure: a failure of self-confidence.” And by Weigel’s reckoning, this failure is “tied to a collapse of faith in the God of the Bible.” the rest