Birth rates hang on nations' spiritual horizons

Young people don't want to share their life with children.

Europe and the United States have resorted to high immigration to prevent slow national death. Countries such as China, Korea and Japan, suffering similar — or more sickly — birthrates, have not had recourse to such a measure. But that said there is a common thread linking those countries that cannot persuade its couples to have more than one child, even to marry.

That thread is the consumerist belief system of young people around the world, as Michael Cook writes on his Mercator website:

Fundamentally, the reason for the decline [in the birth rate] is the same everywhere – the younger generation has no spiritual horizons. Even the Chinese, who are not religious in a Western sense, used to believe in the duty of filial piety of perpetuating the family line [...]. But now, it seems, they are thoroughly materialistic in their outlook.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that it is only in communities with deeply-rooted religious convictions that a pro-natalist outlook can take root. Just look at the Amish or Salafist Muslims or ultra-Orthodox Jews, or various communities of Catholics and Protestants.

Of course, gender equality, government support for families, flexible work schedules and so forth will help boost fertility at the margins. But for reasons which remain mysterious, religious convictions give couples an optimistic outlook on life which promotes large families. So if President Xi is truly determined to elevate “love and marriage, fertility and family” amongst Chinese women, he ought to ditch Marxist dialectical materialism. Will he? Of course not. But he will have to live with the fact that, in the words of one Chinese demographer, “China Is Dying Out”. 

The comforts of consumerism, the learned habit of evading circumstances that require sacrifice of self in terms of time, effort, or discipline — these are the fruit of the mentality, even ideology, that has taken hold of many societies, manifest by the slump in the willingness to serve others through volunteering, as for example in Australia, England, and the United States.

Further, the vague spirituality that the growing numbers of "Nones" claim offers no escape from a bland and superficial perspective concerning social roles and meaning in life. The unfortunate result is that young and old find themselves in the prison of despair, a "Slough of Despond" in the wider religious sense, leading to increases in suicide (about a 10 percent increase in Australia between 2013 and 2022; and see here; and a 16 per cent rise in the US between 2011 and 2022). 

Each society, therefore, is challenged to restore what has been lost among its people and find the source of a meaningful and fulfilling life that taps into our transcendental reality rather than a mere desire for self-invention.

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