Christianity, marriage and childbirth can halt the extinction of the West

Gavin Ashenden• February 13, 2025

For the last 150 years there has been a conflict between secularism and religion. The progressive left in particular were convinced religion left to itself would wither on the vine and ultimately, sometimes speedily, die out.

That didn’t stop Marxist regimes from trying to hurry the process along with the aid of state persecution, however. But that might have been a sign of their impatience as well as implacable hostility.

The outcome has been in fact a substantially different one. For example, in 1989 there was a minuscule number of Christians in the Soviet Union after nearly a century of propaganda, pressure and oppression.  But by 2008 Pew research suggested that 72 per cent had adopted the Christian faith.

In the West, secularism has not yet burnt itself out, but one of the symptoms of secularism is the reluctance to have children. There are a variety of different and complex reasons for this; some have to do with straight-forward selfishness and self-interest. Children are demanding and require sacrifice. A hedonistic culture has left generations underprepared for that.

Feminism, meanwhile, demands the sacrifice of fecund women to the workplace; by the time they can afford to pay a mortgage on only one salary, the window for having children easily or in numbers closes. For some there is a growing awareness that children are too expensive to have.

Others are put off by an apocalyptic climate emergency they’re terrified of; some regard the interference of the state with the children as profoundly threatening, while incidences of sterility, or just difficulty conceiving, have risen in both men and women. The combination of these factors and others, has left Europe in particular with a demographic crisis that has serious implications.

There are a number of different perspective to offer a critique from. Faith and the impact of religious belief is a particularly useful one. Not only because religious belief may help both with a diagnosis, but also more usefully may provide a solution.

A major new report from the Iona Institute called Religion, Marriage and Fertility: Shall the Religious Inherit Ireland? says that the ongoing decline in religious practice will deepen our  demographic crisis because it will almost certainly mean that the trend of fewer people marrying and having children will continue and intensify. This will accelerate population ageing, even allowing for high immigration.

Research has established that Christians, and Catholics in particular, have higher marriage and fertility rates than their secular counterparts. So a simple calculation can be made which demonstrates that the more Christian a culture is, the less the threat of demographic crisis, and vice versa. The replacement level is agreed to be at 2.1 children for women, yet in Ireland the present birth rate is about 1.5. One difficulty with demographic percentages is that they don’t easily translate into real-life outcomes.

A greater sense of why this matters emerges when we realise that by 2050 over 65s will outnumber under 15s by over one million. The elderly require a young generation not only to care for them as their frailty makes ever greater demands on health and social services, but also to be in work in sufficient numbers to provide the money for pensions (which is another disaster waiting to happen).

David Quinn, the chief executive of the Iona Institute, said: “The looming demographic crisis has not received anything like enough attention in Ireland and in particular we have overlooked the link between the decline in religious practice and the decline in our marriage and fertility rates.”

Mr Quinn is trying to reverse the usual terms of the secular assault on the reality of religion and its values, which has been particularly virulent in Ireland with the tragic collapse of Catholicism. “In recent debates about religion”, he said, “there has been too much focus on its negative aspects rather than its positive aspects which include better physical and mental health, lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse, more giving of time and money to charity as well as higher rates of marriage, lower rates of divorce and higher fertility levels.

“We hope our paper will make a contribution to our understanding of the coming demographic crisis and in particular will raise awareness of the very important contribution religious practice makes to societal and personal wellbeing. The decline in religious practice is by no means the boon some people appear to think.”

It was only at the turn of the century that academics in the study of the psychology of religion were able to sufficiently shake off the dead hands of Freud and Weber, and ask whether or not people of faith had more meaning in their lives and were therefore happier. It turned out, greatly to the surprise of the intelligentsia, that there was a direct correlation between faith and well-being.

Those who believed in God and practised their faith had a greater sense of purpose, practised forgiveness better, lived with a more buoyant sense of hope, and through a conscious commitment to loving their neighbours created better social cohesion than their agnostic or atheist counterparts.

Mr Quinn and the Iona Institute take the argument they one step further. They warn that the evidence suggests that in a post Christian culture, only Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular have power to save society from implosion, poverty and collapse. Their paper gives the folk phrase that “children are a gift from God” a political and economic dimension, which has the potential to save a secular society from itself.