Culture Friday - America’s baby bust

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, May 7th, 2021.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Call it the baby bust. A new government report says the number of births in America hit another record low, with the birth rate falling 4 percent last year.

Onize Ohikere reporting for WORLD this week in The Sift:

“The numbers dropped among every major ethnic group: Birth rates fell 4 percent for black and white women, 8 percent for Asian American women, and 3 percent for Hispanic women. The [government] says the birth figures leave the nation ‘below replacement levels,’ [meaning] more people are dying than being born. The lead expert on the report blamed anxiety about the pandemic [in part for] the decline, yet many of the pregnancies began well before the virus hit the United States.”

BROWN: It’s the acceleration of a trend. The 4 percent decline last year is about twice the average annual rate of decline we’ve seen between 2014 and 2019.

The Wall Street Journal said:

“Economists have speculated that the burden of student debt may also delay family formation among millennials.

“Sociologists have pointed to the educational advantage that women have over men as another factor.”

Meaning that “despite expanded business efforts to help with family leave and more flexible work arrangements,” women on career tracks are reasoning that they cannot afford to stop working and build families.

EICHER: It’s Culture Friday. John Stonestreet is here. He’s president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

John, good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: I have an economist friend who says a newborn is like an IPO—an initial public offering—thinking that babies are a type of investment in the future of a culture. What do you think it says about our culture that we’re not replacing ourselves?

STONESTREET: Well, first of all, that's the right question because it does say something about our culture, doesn't say something about the pandemic. This is, if there's anything in our culture that should be qualified as a pre-existing condition of the pandemic, this goes way back. I've been talking about this personally, and I'm no expert, I was just looking at different experts who were reporting on this at least 10 years ago, way before it was cool to talk about this. So it's really something not only that this is happening, but that it's finally being talked about. This is not new news. Well, it's not a new thing. It is new news, apparently.

And that also, the only way to explain this as in economic terms. Let's let all Christians remember that humans are not fundamentally economic creatures. There is an economic aspect of who we are. And so the economic explanations are contributors, but to pretend as if the long history of convincing people that there's nothing unique about human life, that humans are in and of themselves problems to be solved, that get in the way of solutions—not solutions, not sources of solutions themselves, that were objects of problems, you know. That that we have to fix this dilemma that is humanity, rather than humanity being made in the image of God able to be subjects that be contributors in their own story. That is a fundamental worldview reality.

So this is what's being left out of the analysis and all this is the new set of ideas that has been deeply inculcated into and embedded into the mindset of our culture, and therefore into the mindset of so many people, especially younger people. That's what's missing in this whole analysis, and that economics can explain everything, and it just can't.

EICHER: And it's really high level. We went into ethnic groups, but we didn't really go beyond that. I don't know exactly, practically speaking, how you would look deeper into demography. But is it your sense that this cultural trend is leaking over into the church as well?

STONESTREET: Oh, absolutely. It's leaking over into the church. But the problem there again, is a problem of catechesis. So how many churches in America have premarital counseling? Many of them. How many of them talk about the inherent connection and God's created order between sexuality and procreation? Almost none of them. What will be asked of a young couple that's pursuing marriage? Well, do you guys want to have kids? Are you on the same page, right, as if the only right page is the same page, not that there is a fundamental connection of childbearing marriage and sexuality. This is not part there's not an expectation.

Not to mention when it comes to ethics of artificial reproductive technologies, or ethics of, of birth control, that those questions are not even asked. In other words, what's missing in our church wide discussions of sexuality, marriage and children is theology. It's not there, there's a divorce between this, we have decided as a society, that sexuality and the morality of sexuality is completely and utterly and only self determined. So this is one of those examples where the message of the church and the message of the culture with with certainly some incredible exceptions, and so I want to note that, but where it's essentially identical, and in that the church is contributing to the cultural decline, and it missing an incredible opportunity, because the future belongs to the fertile. That's the way the world works.

BROWN: John, I want to call your attention to something that's happening in the Pacific Northwest. In two words: campus mutiny!

This story comes from our colleague Esther Eaton’s report in the latest edition of WORLD Magazine.

So, here's what happening. Seattle Pacific University is an evangelical Christian university. But some students, alumni, and more than 70 percent of the faculty at this school want the university’s board to ditch hiring policies that affirm Biblical marriage between a man and a woman.

And there's an "or else" attached to that demand. Some of the threats include withholding donations and attacking fundraising events and enrollment.

In her report, Esther makes a keen observation. Christian schools often worry about external threats from the government and secular opponents. But this university is facing a threat from within.

What do you think—is this the tip of a bigger iceberg? Or is this an isolated case?

STONESTREET: It's absolutely not an isolated case. If you are under any illusions whatsoever that faculty at local universities that identify as evangelical Christian are in fact in their core beliefs and in their core practices and policies on campus. They may be because there are some that, there are plenty that very much are. But then you've got to you've got to actually ask, you can't see.

And I tell you what's the wrong way to investigate this is by looking at the motto or looking at the the model that's put on the sign. To call Seattle Pacific University an evangelical Christian University is an incredibly unhelpful description. There's no sense in which it is, except with some words that are completely untethered from any significant historic Biblical, theological, or traditional meaning that still decorate their documents. Now, they would also say, "We love like Jesus," but you know what, Buddhists love an awful lot like Jesus, too. So you actually have to look beyond what people say into what they actually teach.

This is a stunning thing. I found this story in Seattle Pacific at Seattle Pacific University to be stunning on a number of levels. One is because now hopefully, at some level, we're seeing the cat out of the bag. I don't want to say it's the best kept secret among evangelical colleges, but it's one of them. And it needs to come out. Seattle Pacific did not give up on a Biblical morality when it comes to marriage first. Long ago, they gave up on things like Biblical authority and Biblical inerrancy. And that's the subtext of this story. And the fact that that's being revealed now hopefully will be helpful to parents. Another indicator of the deeper issue we face in the Christian world right now is that there's an awful lot of people that have paid attention to the story. And they've also seen a story from the other coast in Virginia of a very large Christian university, whose president—the son of the founder—had an enormous moral failure and rightly was removed.

There's a lot of "Christian thought leaders" right now that if you were to ask them, "What is the most important story in Christian higher ed of 2020? Is it 70% of the university faculty giving up on Biblical orthodox convictions on marriage and teaching something that is fundamentally anti to Christian morality and God's design? Or is it the moral failing of a high-profile Trump supporting college president and his wife?" Without hesitation, they're going to point to the failure of the President. I think that that is a major story in Christian education. No question what happened with Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University. But the fact that that is the big stain to angelical Christian higher ed, and that this story out of Seattle Pacific isn't because of something about them being more Christ-like in their behavior or nicer—loving them or whatever—tells you everything you need to know about the vulnerability of Christian higher ed and the vulnerability of Christian evangelical thought leaders, that we have to paraphrase a friend of mine. There's a plague right now, and evangelicalism what we want to punch right and coddle left. And this is an example of that as well.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.