Do People Need Religion To Make Babies?

Why has Europe stopped making babies, asks Frederick Turner?

Is it hardly due to pestilence or environmental degradation. It seems to be more a matter of active choice.

The reason people stop replacing themselves is, I would argue, cultural.



What, basically, persuades people not to have babies even when they have the political, social and economic stability to do so? Among the eras and nations where this phenomenon occurs or occurred one basic characteristic stands out: the loss of a transcendent future.

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One hypothesis about demographic collapse that might be worth checking out is that it happens when a nation loses its religion.

Suppose that when you adopt a materialist worldview, thinking about humans just as special animals, you lose the idea of special meaning, a story about the beginning and the beyond, a promise of transcendental hope? That is what our modern elites are doing with their down-to-earth secular humanism and their existentialism—that every one should seek their own, authentic, path to truth, and avoid the “bad faith” of unquestioningly accepting other peoples’ opinions and ideas.

Suppose that if you hold such beliefs then you tend not to have children and people like you just fade away and disappear.

In that case, you would expect the world to be full of people with

some kind of elaborate, weird belief system involving spiritual beings, a big story or narrative about the world before they were born and the world after they die, and a code of behavior.

That code of behavior would govern everything from practical morals to the duty to the dead.

Frederick Turner has a new book coming out: Natural Religion. No doubt it explores these ideas in detail.