You Can Encourage Americans to Have More Kids and Still Be Honest About What That Means

Last year I wrote a short post about the opportunity for witness that Christians have, given the fact that modern, secular life isn’t really that great. Here’s where I landed the discussion:

Part of the evangelical witness right now should be to point out that modern life stinks. Its technology makes us lonely. Its sexuality makes us empty. Its psychotherapy makes us self-obsessed. Many people are on the brink of oblivion, held back in some cases only by medication or political identity. We struggle to articulate why we should continue to live. Evangelicals should jump in here.

We should jump in to say that technology is not community, and that the human person is not a simulated consciousness but a divinely designed creature which needs the physical world and the physical people that populate it. We should say that friendship doesn’t mean followership.

We should jump in to say that sex is not porn, that consent is not enough, and that marriage is not a straitjacket. We should say that if having as much sex as you want with whomever you want was key to self-fulfillment, our world would look much different. We should say that men need women to be women, and women need men to be men, and both need each other.

This does, however, need a caveat. Yes, cultural apologetics means deconstructing the disappointments and suffering that many people in the post-Christian West are experiencing. But in that task, there may be a temptation to sound appealing to unbelievers by simply flipping their felt problems by 180 degrees. This would mean pointing out that modern life stinks, but over-promising the power of Christianity to make it better.

There are at least two ways to over-promise here. The first way is the way most readers of this newsletter know is bad: prosperity gospel, health-and-wealth, Paula-White-is-the-one-female-preacher-Christian Nationalists-are-OK-with type stuff. "Become a Christian and you’ll get promoted, you’ll get the hot spouse, you’ll get the life you always wanted.” I don’t think I have a huge readership in the sectors of evangelicalism that would openly endorse this. But it bears mentioning anyway: This is bad and those who peddle it should feel bad (and repent).

The second way, however, is something I suspect is already going on with more doctrinally orthodox evangelicals. The second way to over-promise the benefits of Christianity to a garbage modern existence is to play down the very real sacrifies that Christian love calls us to. In our eagerness to apply the medicine of Christianity to the ills of loneliness, disillusionment, and despair, there is a very real threat that we are dishonest with ourselves and with others about just how medicinal Christianity can feel.

The big example I have in mind is having and raising children. In our current cultural moment, a lot of people are deciding to skip starting a family. This is sometimes blamed on the economy, sometimes on climate change, but the better explanation is that wealth, mobility, and shifts in gender roles constitute a massive plausibility structure for a childfree life. However, deliberate childlessness has risen almost parallel with stunning levels of loneliness and anxiety. As lifestyles have become more independent from family life, with its obligations, stresses, and its intrinsically conservatizing effects, they’ve also become more prone to self-referential despair.

Christians are noticing this. And the messaging has, appropriately, been something like, “Taste and see.” Christians and those on the Right have been pumping out features, essays, podcasts, and more, encouraging modern people that there are depths of joy and meaning they can find through caring for kids.

I count myself firmly among this group. My wife and I welcomed our firstborn just 14 months after our wedding. We now have three beautiful children, and we thank God daily for his kindness and grace to us. The lines have fallen for us in very pleasant places.

But it’s also true that having kids is hard.