Historically, Christian nations have welcomed the fruit of the womb as a great blessing of God. Yet over the last six decades, there’s been a stark shift away from fruitfulness, as selfishness has displaced a love for many children. In the U.S. alone, the total fertility birthrate per woman has dropped from 3.58 in 1960 to a low point of 1.77 in 1979. And 2022’s total was a meager bump up from there to 1.78.  

So what’s at the heart of this fertility decline? In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by data analyst Drew Davis, break down the global numbers, explaining how women leaving the home for the workforce, the rise of contraceptives and abortion, and a general valuing of more “worldly things” over eternal souls have led to this unbiblical shift. Despite these bad trends, Christians should joyfully return to the Scripture’s call to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). They should embrace the great Gospel impact they can have by raising more sons and daughters to fear the Lord—children who “shall not be ashamed, but [who] shall speak with the enemies in the gate” (Ps. 127:5). 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're gonna talk about crashing birth rates, people aren't having children anymore. We're gonna cast a vision for the alternative, but we've got charts to prove all of this that our friend Drew Davis has given us, and so we're gonna show those to you. Also, we want to invite you to our Build, Dwell, Plant Conference in St. Louis and Missouri, October 26 and 27, where we're going to cast a countercultural vision for having babies planting gardens, building houses, and dwelling in the land.

Hope you can join us here at the conference and hope you enjoy the discussion about crashing birth rates here in America and all over the world. So Jason, we have Drew Davis with us. It's good to be here with Drew. Hi, Drew. Hey, how are you?

It is Good to be here with Drew. Hi, Drew. Hey, how are you? It is good to be here with Drew. Drew's a data analyst, and he's made a lot of charts for us.

I have. You have, yeah. There's a lot of data about this. Remember the COVID charts? I do.

Oh, by the way, go back and check out the COVID charts that we did with Drew back during the COVID insanity. Yes. But today, Drew, we want to talk about some other charts that you came to us with, really about fertility rates, which really reflect an understanding of children, understanding of family life. And the charts you're showing us were shocking. Now, we've been hearing news of declining birth rates for a long time, but it was very interesting the way that you framed the data.

So that's what we want to talk about. And frankly, I think we want to say without question, This data really reflects a rejection of a Christian worldview and an understanding of children and family life that is completely contrary to the Word of God. So that's why we want to talk about it and on the upside make an observation the people that we're connected with in family integrated churches and other like-minded people, we have charts that look very, very different because we're creating Christian culture. So, anyway, okay. So run us through the numbers.

Absolutely. So the first view we have up here is the United States historical total fertility rate, starting approximately 1960 and going until 2022. So as you can see, on the graph in 1960, we started at a rate of about 3.6. So that would be for every woman, they would have 3.6 kids on average. And then you can see as time goes on, that number just really drops off the cliff.

And this number is way down from the colonial era. The 3.6 reflects a sharp decrease from the colonial era where people were having lots of children. But anyway, so keep going. Absolutely. So yeah, I'll flip over here and just these are some of the items that are influencing this steep drop-off.

So, you know in a period of about 10 years, 15 years from 1960 to like 1973, 1974, the fertility rate in America was cut in half from about 3.6 to about 1.7. Lots of factors influenced that. For example, starting around 1960, you started to have a steep rise in the trend of women working outside the home. You know, 1965, the pill became widely available. You know, 1970, you'll start seeing a steep increase in the average marriage age for someone's first marriage.

And then, you know, 1969, no fault divorce comes onto the scene. And then, of course, in 1973, unfortunately, we had Roe versus Wade. Yeah, so you started with women in the workforce. That's a critical data point. At the turn of the century, about 5% of married women were in the workforce.

Today, it's right about 70%. Only about 10 points fewer than men. The gap has been closing between men and women in the workforce, and it's now it's just about 10 percentage points away from each other. So you see this sharp decline of men in the workforce and this sharp increase of women in the workforce, and now the delta's very, very small. And Of course, I think women in the workforce was accelerated during World War II.

Women went into the factories and many of them never went back home. So let me read probably the flagship passage on the value of children from scripture, which is Psalm 127, three through five. It says, Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth.

Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed, but shall speak with their enemies in the gate." So scripture speaks of people as they have children, an abundance of children, it being a source of happiness to them. The numbers that we're seeing here reflect sort of a rejection of that. People saying, essentially, saying without saying what the Bible says about children and a plurality of children and abundance of children actually isn't true. So if we look at these different landmarks, let's talk about exactly what they mean.

Drew, you said around 1960, the percentage of women working outside the house is increasing. What does that represent? It represents a de-prioritizing of the home and a prioritizing of two full-time paychecks. So we said, nationally, It's better to have two full-time paychecks than it is to have a house full of children. When that happened, the chart points down.

It points down sharply. You said around 1965, the pill becomes widely available. What does that represent? That represents the separation of physical intimacy from the probability of procreation. So those had always been joined before physical intimacy meant a decent probability of procreation.

But now you've totally separated them so they become not joined categories but separate categories. So you can say, I can have this one thing without having what's probable to result from this one thing. And of course, that was God's design. God made physical intimacy to have a probability of procreation. You know, I remember, it was a little over 20 years ago, there was a really controversial thing that happened right here in Wake Forest.

Maybe you remember it. When Paige Patterson came to Southeastern Seminary, it wasn't long after he showed up that he shut down the seminary daycare center. I don't remember that at all. Oh, it was wild. I mean, the newspapers were in flames.

And what Dr. Patterson said was, these seminary wives need to go home and take care of their children. That was very controversial, and he took a lot of pain in the neck from that. But actually he had a biblical worldview of the family and he thought that mothers should be home with their children. You have these two other landmarks on the chart too.

Well, here, let's just hang on because I want to focus in on the sixties. So I was alive during the sixties. And I've been telling people this for years. If you were alive, if you were self-conscious in about a five-year period in the late 60s and the early 70s, you saw the culture flip. You saw the culture change.

For example, the high school that I went to as a freshman was a completely different high school that I went to as a senior. And It was probably more pronounced than most places in California where you were. Yeah, I was in... The flipping was happening harder there. Yeah, everything flows from California at that time.

And it was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was the hippie movement. It was the great, demonic, demon-possessed rock and roll stars of the 1960s and 70s. It was the Rolling Stones. It was the Cream.

It was all these, and we still hear the, I still hear their songs in the restaurants and in the stores today. And it takes me back to those days when the culture flipped and you could actually see it flip. And we've never been the same. So I think that these numbers here, they absolutely corroborate with that idea that during the 60s and the early 70s, the culture changed. And we've been on this trajectory, and it's increasing and it's accelerating, the trouble that we have today goes right back down to those times.

And now the bass line is so different that when you hear those songs, you don't think counterculture, it's the oldies, right? It just means the baseline is a completely new baseline than it was 50 years ago. I'm offended by those songs. Those songs are a disturbance to my soul because I know what they did. I know what they did to my friends.

I know what they did to my friends' children. To the new generation, though, it's not an offense. It's just the oldies. It just shows how far, how different we are, radically different we are from them. And I can't help when I hear those songs to think of Psalm 101.

I hate the work of those who fall away. That's what David says. And so, but these things have had cataclysmic impacts on the family. And so, anyway, keep talking, Drew. What else do we have on this chart?

Let me make a specific request. Tell us about the red line. What's the significance of it? So that red line is 2.1 children and that represents population stability. So anything under that and your population is decreasing, anything over that and your population is increasing.

So when the blue line starts to fall below the red line, what that means is that over time, if you take immigration out of the equation, your country's population will start to shrink. And outside of the biblical aspects, there's all kinds of economic impacts for America specifically, right? That's why Social Security is starting to have trouble. They're estimating the next two decades and other things, because there's just not enough young workers to be able to support an aging population. So you can see with the blue line there, at 1960 you were way above the stability line.

And then by 1972, you were right at the line plunging beneath it. So the plunge happened really fast here. I think one of the things we want to point out is how lightning fast that was. How fast that was. Yeah.

That's remarkable. You have these other two landmarks, Scott and Drew, that Drew's pointed out on the chart. In 1970, the marriage age starts to increase. We've got another chart on that later we can go to, but it's significantly up now. And of course, the impact on that of birth rate is obvious.

And then in 1973, you had Roe versus Wade. So not only have we disconnected physical intimacy from the probability of procreation. Now, even when procreation has taken place, you can legally put an end to that life. And about a clip of a million a year have happened since 1973. And I don't know how many we've aborted with the different abortifacients and abortion clinics.

You take that and you take this kind of decline. I wonder how many more people would be living in America today? 100 million, 150 million, I don't know what the number is, but think about adding 100 million more consumers. In other words, Consumers are good because they buy things. They buy cars, they buy houses.

They actually, they increase the velocity of money in an economy. And My view is that we would have a rockin' economy like we don't have as quite as we do now if those people had been born. Of course, the counterargument that you hear to that is the world is overpopulated. So will you take a crack at addressing that? Yeah, would you like to get on an airplane?

Just get on an airplane and see, what do they say? You can fit the entire world's population in the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida. If everybody has like five, I don't know how many square feet. Yeah, I think everybody gets a square foot within the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida, so you could put the whole population there. We wouldn't have a lot of room, you only get one square foot, but there would be nowhere out, No one anywhere else on planet Earth, we would all be jammed there in Jacksonville, Florida.

The other stat that I heard several years ago was that we could all have 10 acres in the state of Texas. So everybody gets 10 acres, no one else anywhere else on planet Earth, and we all have our 10 acres in Texas. Wow, that's amazing. I don't want 10 acres in Texas. In Texas.

Not on the rear grand river. Not right now. Yeah, that's how our population is increasing is through immigration and people running across the border. Okay, so anything else to point out on this one here? Well, you got Roe v.

Wade in there. Yeah. So you have these forces at work that are really driving biblical family life into oblivion. Absolutely, just destroying the typical family. And each one of those markers, there are five of them there, I think they come together to produce this chart.

In other words, if you said, within a 15-year span, you're going to have these five things happen. What do you think the chart will look like? This is the chart you would draw. They have had their effect, and it was a predictable effect, and it has happened. You see these five things and it is a rejection of what the Bible says, which is children are a reward.

You're happy if you have an abundance of them. People have said, no, that's actually not true. Yeah, and why children like Malachi, too? God wants godly offspring, so we should replicate offspring and bring them the word of God and preach the gospel to them every day. So that's a Christian worldview.

It's diminished by these cultural forces. I don't want us to get by this slide without just going right back to the 1960s. You don't want to play games with secularism. You don't want to play games with the entertainers and the music revolutionaries that are actually being used to unravel really important things. Everybody who's listening, just think about this.

It's just a catchy song. It's not just a catchy song. It was a catchy song that took the world in exactly the opposite direction of what Scripture says. And we can pickle our brains in these words that seem only a little off or not so bad, but they're taking us in a different direction and valuing things radically different than Scripture values them. Matthew Absolutely.

You know, earlier you'd asked me about that red line, and something that just came to mind is the Bible tells us to be fruitful and multiply. And I know different people have different interpretations on that passage, but when a country's fertility rate drops below that red line, I mean, you're definitely subtracting at that point. There's no multiplication that's going on. And once it drops below a certain point, and I don't recall what it is, the recovery time is multiple generations. You don't just snap back from a 1.6 birth rate.

It will take years, maybe hundreds of years to get it back. We have another slide ahead that kind of speaks a little bit to that, but let's, let's, We're not there yet. So let's talk about other countries. Yeah, so just briefly, I pulled up the stats on some other countries. I tried to pick countries that most people would consider having some sort of Christian heritage historically.

Definitely not a historian, but I just kind of polled some of my friends to see, you know, what came to mind when you think of a historically Christian country or a country with some of that heritage. And so, you know, one of them that came up was in the Netherlands. And, you know, as you can see here, similar story to the United States, not as extreme and quick of a drop off. You can see there's, you know, it took longer to reach that bottom and they didn't start off as high as we did, but just another example of a country just walking away from their Christian heritage as it relates to children. I have a friend who I was with just in the last couple of weeks who came over from the Netherlands.

He lives in the Netherlands. And he was telling me things I didn't know. He said that there's a really major Bible belt in the Netherlands where you have true Christianity, reformed Christianity. And he said that his perspective is that in one generation, there will be hardly any more atheists left in the Netherlands because they're not having children. He said there will be two populations.

There will be these conservative Christians in the Bible Belt, and there will be Muslims. And that's all you'll have competing in the marketplace for ideas in the Netherlands. But you can see that fertility rate dropping very similar, not quite as dramatic as the United States. The only comment I would have on that is that's only true if the atheists aren't successful in coming and getting our children. So they might not be having their own children, but they have their sights set on ours.

Amen. Yeah. Good thought. Absolutely. Especially through the public schools.

I mean, I think that's a key way, even if they're not physically taking it, but mentally, to just, you know, start shifting the tide. Is Netherlands a lot of homeschooling or is that forced public schools? Do you know? I don't know. I'm guessing it's compulsory public education, but I don't know for sure.

Almost every nation in the world has compulsory public education. Okay, now we've got the UK, kind of pretty similar as, you know, as the Netherlands. Yeah, definitely. It's a very similar, you know, time period. Again, even less of a drop there, right?

The UK was only at, you know, 2.7 in 1962, roughly. So, they were starting from an even lower starting point than the Netherlands and the United States. You know, when I was in high school, it was 2.2. Our family had three children, five people in the family. And my friends at high school were amazed at what a big family we had.

Haha. Oh, if they could see you now. Yes, exactly. And then, you know, a similar story for Germany, another kind of historical, semi-Christian Western nation, very similar time period, and fertility rate collapsed. There is one even lower, though.

I mean, if you notice, they went to like 1.3 in 2007. Yeah, I mean, these nations are in decline. They're in numerical decline. They're going away. They're being eclipsed by other nations.

Well, and Immigration. Immigration is what's keeping them afloat. We don't have France up here on the slide, but I know right now they're even working on some laws that are trying to force integrate immigrants into their culture. What you have is if you have a declining population and then you've got like a massive influx of immigration, it just starts to reshape your culture completely. Okay, now this is very startling.

Again, let's go right back to the 60s. It's a defining period. The culture flipped, and it flipped on so many levels. And this is just one median age at first marriage, and this begins in 1890. Drew, talk us through this chart.

Yeah, absolutely. So if You start around 1950, that's when they had solid, real data, if you will. You can see the solid lines before that. Those dots are estimates based on older historical records. The farther back you go, the less data there is.

Starting in 1950-ish, the average age that a woman would get married would be 1920. And then, you know, the men, a handful of years older than them. But then, you know, starting around 1960, 1970, I mean, look at the steep rise. Just skyrockets. You have sexual revolution.

You've got all kinds of, you know, cultural forces, you know, raining down. And people are getting married later, progressively. And they're not having kids or as many kids. And they're not getting married at all. It's true.

That definitely has an impact on the numbers. Yeah. It's like Sweden. People don't get married in Sweden hardly anymore. The younger generation is not getting married.

They're just living together. That's a global…it'd be interesting to see other nations here on this because, you know, marriage rates are declining dramatically, and particularly in Europe. For sure. And this is just the median age for people that do get married. So this isn't weighted, you know, with the population that isn't getting married.

So I'm sure that this would be a much steeper graph, right, if it was just the average age of marriage. Yeah, how many are not getting married? What does that graph look like? But yeah, this just shows that people, they don't value marriage. They don't value the formation of a family like they used to.

Well, if you take away kids, which are kind of like a cornerstone to marriage biblically, and one of the main reasons for marriage, procreation. I mean, you take that away, and more and more people are leaving the faith or not entering in at all. So then not having kids, no faith, I mean, what's the point of marriage at that point? It makes sense that it's increasing. Yeah.

You know, you showed us a slide of countries where the fertility rate is above four. Let's look at that. Why don't you walk us through that one? Absolutely. So the bigger the box and the darker the color indicates a higher rate.

And then you've got the name of the country on the top listed with their fertility rate as of 2022. And then down below is the definition of total fertility rate. So that's what we've been looking at throughout the entirety of this conversation. And if you just kind of look through the countries, I'm no expert on this, So I was just looking up each one, and you'll notice that most of them are Muslim or Catholic. There's not a lot of Christians, Christian countries in this list.

So I was the one with a notebook and a pen earlier, so you're reading off stats, and I took the notes, so I'll read the notes. Niger 98% Muslim, Somalia 99% Muslim, Chad 52% Muslim and 22% Catholic, Congo 55% Catholic. So it's Muslim and Catholic nations that are actually upholding traditional birth rates. Amazing. Okay, so let's talk about the big, massive picture of the nations of the world.

Why don't you show us that slide? Yeah, absolutely. This is an animated slide. And Drew's going to, it's a moving target. So we're going to let Drew narrate this moving target.

So can I just preface it? Because the first time I watched it, I don't think I got it. And the people who were watching might have had the same problem I did. Watch the countries because they're going to change in relationship to each other. As they move out in time, they'll be switching places.

So just watch for the countries to be trading places. Yeah, absolutely. If you look in the top right of the video, once it gets started, so you'll see the year. So the data is gonna continue to scroll through and update as the years go on. And then you'll see the global total, but the real story is down below and you'll see how the countries, as Jason said, change and drop out of the top ten.

So this is not fertility rate anymore, but total population. So you'll see some countries like China, even though their fertility rate has dropped off a lot, They just started with such a base size population, they can stay towards the top. But you know, eventually fertility rate will catch up with some of those countries. And we're starting in 1967, right? We are.

Yeah. I'll kick it off. So as you can see, Pakistan joins the list and the United Kingdom almost instantly drops away. It's kind of the first top 10 Western nation to drop off in the 60s. Nigeria is coming on board as one of the top countries.

And then give it a few years, you'll see Germany starting to fall off the list as the Middle Eastern and African countries kind of overtake. You can see Germany is at the bottom now, and they're about to drop off before long. You've got Mexico, so there's that Catholic influence. Russia just dropped down. Russia dropped down.

Japan just dropped down again. I've been watching Japan drop steadily. Absolutely. And keep an eye on India also. You'll see that they have an explosive growth.

And there goes Japan again, dropping further. Nigeria continuing to increase. Russia again continuing to fall. Dropping like a rock. And yeah, if you notice, the United States, at this point, we're growing, but barely.

Look at how little change is going on compared to other countries. And that's via immigration, not fertility. Correct. Because we're falling in fertility. But you see the impact of scale with China and India and how fast they move because of the number of people they have in their country.

Well, okay, what are we saying? We're saying there is a Christian worldview that has to do with family and children and marriage. And you're watching the worldview play out while you watch the animation on this and countries drop, they're dropping because of a worldview. They're rising because of a worldview. Yeah.

Absolutely. And what we've been saying for years is, families, be fruitful and multiply, raise children, do the things that God told you to do. The rest of the world is turned away from it, but not the Christians. And it's a blessing. And like you said at the very beginning, Jason, quoting the Word of God, children are a blessing.

I think that's what we want to say. Absolutely. Yeah. There's a tremendous opportunity as we have children, but unbelievers don't have children, if we can keep our children from being taken into a different worldview to have a disproportionate impact. Christians should be thinking of this in terms of opportunity.

There's an opportunity to be fruitful and multiply and have a disproportionate impact for the gospel because we're actually valuing children. Yeah, amen. Okay, well thank you guys. Drew, thank you so much. It's remarkable.

We're gonna come back with some more charts at another time on the LGBTQ movement. We'll announce that later on, but we really appreciate your work. Thank you. Absolutely, It's a pleasure being here. The numbers tell the story.

The numbers tell the story. They do. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. We really hope to see you next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches.

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