This is turning out to be an exciting morning. Our “Baby” Kitty, who is pretty enormous, is slaughtering a mouse and I keep being interrupted by news bulletins of the various gruesome details. In between cries of horror, I have been reading this interesting piece. The author, Ed West, starts this way:
Airports tell us a lot about a country’s social values and norms. Last year we were returning from our holiday in Andalucía, me an especially elegant shade of beetroot red, tired and fed up after the ordeal of flying. Afters we arrived at Stansted, one member of staff kindly took us aside and told us we needn’t bother following the people in front of us because instead we were to go through the family queue. Oh wow, I thought, that’s the sort of thing I’d really only expect in somewhere like Italy; so refreshing to see it back home.
We walked into the hall, surrounded by hundreds of other tired holiday makers, where we inched to a virtual standstill; only then did we look across the waiting area and make out the singletons and city break couples on the other side of a partition zipping through their queue, and it occurred to us that we, in fact, had been removed to make their lives easier, not vice versa. Oh well.
Too often have I been there. Most recently, jaunting about Europe with six basically grown but still, for all reasonable considerations, children last summer was, to put it mildly, complex. The modern world is not made for two people to have vast numbers of their own children. It is logistically expensive and, tragically, embarrassing. People say things they shouldn’t, and stare. I compensate for my own cringe-worthy status by making jokes—”I just had my own and someone else’s” and, “Yes I do know where they come from.” Ha Ha. Except it’s not funny. Anyway, the joke’s on the whole world now. West points out the coming statistical catastrophe:
This week a new record was set within that crisis, with news that South Korea’s total fertility rate has fallen to a low of 0.78, dead last among 39 OECD countries. Even Japan, long the poster child for catastrophically low fertility, enjoys a whopping 1.3 TFR, which makes them seem like the Amish in comparison.
South Korea is one of the postwar era’s great success stories. From being among the world’s poorest nations in 1945, it is now among the richest. Its life expectancy has increased by 40 years since 1950, while today it scores among the highest in reading, science and maths, according to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. Yet it is also collapsing in on itself.
Everywhere this is happening, of course. And various countries are doing all they can to stop it and go the other way. West points out that all those efforts will, in the words of the psalm, be “in vain” because there is no prestige associated with having children. How does one get the prestige back? By a society deciding once more to believe in God, but that is only working in one country in Europe. Georgia, he writes,
is still the most religious country in Europe, and as part of the national effort to raise fertility, its Orthodox patriarch agreed to baptise every third (and subsequent) child in each family.
I’m not sure what the British equivalent would be, since I doubt most people in England would particularly be fussed by the Archbishop of Canterbury christening their child; if the state was involved, presumably a special multifaith naming ceremony with Mr Blobby and this year's Love Island winner, with music by the NHS choir and a special gift of Captain Sir Tom Moore’s gin.
What a terrible indictment. The two psalms from this morning’s Daily Office (which it would so help the clergy of the Church of England to consider taking up as a Lenten discipline) put it in a more poetical light. I’m pasting them here so you don’t have to go clicking around (compressed for size). The first is Psalm 127:
Unless the Lord builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it. Unless the Lord keeps the city, the watchman keeps vigil in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early, and take rest so late, and eat the bread of toil. for he gives to his beloved sleep. Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is a gift that comes from him. Like arrows in the hand of the warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them; he shall not be ashamed when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
This psalm, as you may have noticed, is much maligned today because of the “quiver-full” movement. Having a lot of children, so even some “Christians” try to say, is really a bad thing for everyone. How will the mother be happy if she is giving birth every year? How will the children be ok if they have to all grow up in a pack? It doesn’t help when big families make it into the news for behaving badly and having bad theology. Surely you don’t want to be like that! So goes the narrative. It is the second psalm, 128, though, that really is, as they say, “counter-cultural.” It goes like this (again, compressed for space and time):
Blessed are those who fear the Lord and walk in his ways. For you shall eat the labors of your hands; it shall be well with you, and happy you shall be. Your wife shall be as a fruitful vine upon the walls of your house, your children like olive branches round about your table. Indeed, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord. May the Lord bless you out of Zion; may you see Jersualem in prosperity all your life ling. May you see your children’s children, and may there be peace upon Israel.
Someone (actually, I think it was me) commented this morning (we offer Morning Prayer on zoom to our church and a good ten of us show up regularly every day) that the metaphor of olive shoots around a table is incomprehensible in a non-agricultural society, such as ours. Why would you even want that? The image would have to be of some sort of machine coughing up data points or something. There is no common familial work, no dependence on a Being for the rain or the goodness of the soil. The sleep, the abundance, the happiness are all accomplished by other means. It is only when it is too late that the men and the women discover that the happiness, such as it was, was unsatisfying, fleeting even, and that giving up your life for the next generation would have provided immeasurable consoling charms. That is because it is in the relationships that people have with other people, and not the accumulation of more stuff that the family and then the city and even, I suppose, the nation finds its true fulfillment and joy.
So yes, the honoring of parents would be a good way to get back to a world in which people wanted to have children, but the only way back there is to believe in God, who gives all the gifts, and the only way to get back to a belief in God is for the people who already believe to tell the people who don’t about him, and that is increasingly going to be against the law. So anyway, have a nice day!
Two comments:
(1) what a delight it is to read your essay here on Substack! So much easier on the eyes.
(2) the difficult thing about this topic among Christians is knowing that there are so many Christian couples would love to have children and cannot. Because of that, many stay silent in the Christian community, rather than risk hurting a sister or brother on this very sensitive subject. However, we must at least attempt to speak the truth in love, and I'm thankful you have done that with this essay. Kevin DeYoung also wrote on this a few months ago, and I thought he did it in a sensitive, but convicting way.
The large families in my parish have cheerful, well-behaved children and have parents that are good examples to the parish. They have large families because, at least in part, they are skilled at raising children. I'm eastern Catholic (Melkite)..our priest is married and he and his wife have 7 children. Three other families in the parish have at least 7 children. If the wives weren't religious, they might well be running a small business or growing a hi-tech startup. But why settle for that?