In the Pew study demographics were cited most as the explanation for the shift over the decade. The religious groups with older populations and a falling birthrate are struggling to keep up with those who have younger members and who laud the larger family. The religions in decline are distinctly those in which marriage is more and more optional and children are not essential. Europe and North America certainly fill that bill as they have more singles, smaller families, and an aging population so the once dominant religion of that area, Christianity, now has and will have fewer members going forward. In contrast, in Sub-Saharan Africa large families and high esteem for marriage along with a significant conversion rate means the number of Christians there is increasing.
What is true of Christians in these areas is also true of the Islamic nations of the Middle East and Northern Africa. It is also true at least of the newer immigrant populations in the West who also claim Islam as their faith. Birth rates matter. The Lutheran lands of old (Northern Europe and Scandinavia) are showing the worst effects of the loss of marriage as a cultural ideal and the loss of children as a high value of marriage. As someone once said, as goes Western Europe, soon goes America, and as goes America, so goes Christianity in the West. I once saw that credited to Adrian Rodgers, the Southern Baptist preacher of a previous generation but it is a case of the obvious.
My point today is to say that the future of Christianity -- in particular in the West but literally everywhere -- depends upon the healthy state of the family, recovery of marriage as the norm, and the rejection of abortion and birth control out of the desire to enjoy larger families. We cannot evangelize ourselves out of our decline. There are plenty of people to be evangelized and I am not at all suggesting that we should not make a public proclamation of the Gospel. Just the opposite. But the reality is that we could speed up adult conversions in the West and still see our overall Christian population continue to diminish. The key to the health of the West is the same as the key to the health of Christianity in the West -- the recovery of the value and virtue of marriage and children. Christianity, however, has to do a better job of retaining our children in the face of a growing secular influence in public education and a culture more and more unfriendly to the faith. This will mean some hard choices for those parents and families and a change in the values of Christians to be more distinct from the rest of the population. Surely this is not a bad thing.
Christianity has suffered as the decision of our ancestors in the early 1930s and 1940s was to embrace birth control and normalize the ideal of a smaller family. It has also suffered in the large number of Christian denominations who were late to the battle against abortion, no-fault divorce, and the full embrace of the sexual revolution in the plethora of sexual desires and gender identities that has now become normal. Other Christian denominations chose not to join the fight at all and simply caved into the prevailing direction of secular culture. Orthodoxy and catechesis are the ongoing causes by which Christians not only retain the faith but keep the faithful in that faith. This is a profound lesson we should have learned but the reality is that it is hard for us now to stand out and against what has become the norm in the West. It will be going forward as well.
Finally, while Christians do better than we assume at evangelizing, for every 18 folks who walk through the front door, 5-6 walk out the back door. Muslims do a terrible job of converting with barely 2 new folks walking through the front door but they do not lose many and so their trajectory is always pointed higher than Christianity as a whole. This is where catechesis enters in -- not simply the formal instruction that takes place at the church building but the catechesis of the home in which mom and dad impart the faith, model it, and help it grow in their children. Many of the folks who left Christianity simply were never there in the first place. They had not been assimilated as children or as adults and so a faith that remained on the outside of their lives became easy to jettison at the first sign of trouble or disappointment. We are not doing a bad job of welcoming new people but we are not doing a very good job of modeling, instructing, and helping them in the doctrine and piety of the faith. If we had, the gains we registered at the front door would not be so diluted by those exiting the back door.
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More information about the birth rate decline in the LCMS and what it might take to keep the LCMS from going extinct by the end of the century can be found in the March 10, 2025, Ad Crucem News article, "Must the LCMS Accept Its Orderly Extinction?" (https://www.adcrucem.news/p/must-the-lcms-accept-its-orderly)
What you said about demographics is true, and the decline in births has negatively affected many countries. As a child growing up in the Long Island suburbs of NY, the neighborhoods were filled with children playing everywhere. The schools were abuzz with youngsters. I had friends and knew their sisters and brothers as well. At church, first communions and confirmations were big events. So sad today. From my apartment window, I do not hear children at play, no chatter, no laughter, no running about. It is quiet. There are young couples in our complex. Few have children, and if so, just one at best. I have spoken to young people who don’t even want to have a baby at all. Yet, children are a blessing. They brought so much joy into our marriage. My wife and I were young parents. We had two sons and a daughter. We text and call them regularly, and I can’t imagine anyone objecting to have a child. But it is what it is. God commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. The Lord esteemed the family as basic to society. But having children requires that they be raised properly, and unfortunately, this is where some societies fail. They must be raised in the knowledge and reverence of God. Soli Deo Gloria
I was talking with a woman who had grown up in Quebec, the youngest of 15 children. She explained how the priests would bully women with warnings of purgatory if they did not produce enough babies. “Then came the Quiet Revolution” of the 1960’s. Québécois said NO to the RC church running their lives and families became much smaller. Quebec became much more prosperous as families with just a few kids could afford to send them to university and so get better jobs.” This woman and her husband had no children. “I did not want a life like my parents had.” The big old RC churches are now like museums.
Family recovery
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