Stripped of today’s contraceptive mentality, this is a no-brainer. Another fine piece, titled Just Another Painful School Closing, by Terry Mattingly at GetReligion. Be sure to read the entire piece and the comments as well. A snippet:
I forget when and where it was in which, as a reporter, I heard a stunning lecture on the impact of birthrates and basic demographics on the rise and fall of religious institutions in the United States and elsewhere.What made the lecture so interesting was the connection the speaker — it might have been the United Methodist thinker Lyle Schaller — made between traditional forms of religion and higher birth rates (and, correspondingly, between liberal forms of religion and much lower birth rates). Think about the recent decline of mainline Protestantism. Think about churches in Europe.
Why, just last Sunday I attended RC Mass at St. Henry's in Helsinki, Finland. The crowd was about 20% Finn, 5% tourist, the rest were local Africans, Asians, Indians, etc. (I suppose many worked at embassies…don't know). Virtually every non-Finn was there with at least one child, more with 2, some with 3, and all young'uns. Finland's TFR (Total Fertility Rate) is 1.83. Their labor pool is expected to go into decline starting in 2010…I guess some would call that progress.
What most impressed us in Helsinki that day was the short supply of Finnish kids. Of course if a social welfare system promotes cradle-to-grave adolescence, then why bother to do the definitive adult thing and raise some children?
Declining birth rates have undermined just about all institutions, including even "conservative" ones. For a long time, we have lived high by consuming the seed corn (i.e., by not having children and wasting the money saved by helping to finance a life style above our means), now the famine comes and our failure to invest in the next generation is beginning to show itself. But even now, most refuse to see the cause of so many of our woes. You reap what you sow. Those who sow sparingly will reap sparingly. Welcome to harvest season.