Troubling news about the future of the family in America

A new report this week from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) examines the current state of, and possible futures, for marriage and childbearing in America, and the situation is sobering.

The study’s findings turn on three main axes considering the COVID-19 pandemic: economic, religious, and political. The combined picture, as the report puts it, is of a likely future in which there is increasing disparity along these three dimensions: “As the pandemic lifts, the nation is likely to see a deepening divide between the affluent and everybody else, between the religious and the secular, and between Republicans and Democrats in their propensity to marry and have children.”

Economic concerns in the formation of families have long been formative. For thousands of years in agricultural contexts, children represented a primary way to increase the productive power of a household. Only in the modern world has procreation become increasingly optional, a lifestyle accessory that depends more on the desires of the would-be parents than the necessities of survival. The Protestant reformer Martin Luther examined the rationalizations behind hesitancy to marry and have children in the early modern period of urbanization and economic development in his treatment of “The Estate of Marriage.” Indeed, Luther called anxiety about the ability to provide for a family “the greatest obstacle to marriage.”

Religiosity is closely linked to such economic worries. Luther goes so far as to call concerns about God’s willingness to provide for a family the result of a “lack of faith and doubt of God’s goodness and truth.” After all, God has promised to provide for those who trust in him and Christians are taught to pray for daily bread. We are told not to worry about food and clothing since it is the “Gentiles who seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.” But putting the kingdom of God first reorients our values and assures us that God will provide, that “all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:32-33).

Where marriage and childbearing are reduced to merely economic or material calculations, it makes sense that many people might judge that the investment and risk are not worth it, in purely economic terms. Numerous proposals try to make the economic arithmetic make more sense, from child tax credits (which have taken on new forms during the pandemic) to legal requirements for family leave. The deeper challenge, though, is that such interventions can only have a limited impact where the decision to marry and form a family is made within a purely worldly frame. Here is an opportunity for Christians to proudly declare the inherent good and worth of marriage apart from pure economic concerns.

Other developed nations that have seen increasing material wealth and correlative secularization have not prevented demographic drop-offs, despite increasingly generous social spending. In this sense, a flourishing society requires not only material security but the spiritual basis for temporal faithfulness and trust in the future. Getting married and attempting to have children are inherently risky enterprises. People choose to have children when they have strong motivations for doing so, motives that must transcend mere economic calculation.

“He who would enter into wedlock as a Christian,” writes Luther, “must not be ashamed of being poor and despised, and doing insignificant work. He should take satisfaction in this: first, that his status and occupation are pleasing to God; second, that God will most certainly provide for him if only he does his job to the best of his ability, and that, if he cannot be a squire or a prince, he is a manservant or a maidservant.” This explains why religiosity is such a strong predictor of openness to a fruitful future: it takes trust in God’s providence to invest the time, treasure, and love necessary to build families.

Children are necessary for a society to flourish, and the demographic trends across the developed world—including the United States—are far from healthy. And a society where only certain groups or subsets of the population have the economic and spiritual wherewithal to pursue such socially necessary undertakings as the formation of families is one that is deeply confused and troubled.

We must work, hope, and pray for revival in the United States. We need a revival of our trust in God to provide for us—and for our children.