How to be a revolutionary

The other day I congratulated a young colleague who told me that his wife is pregnant.

“You’re defying the culture,” I told him.

“What do you mean?”

I told him that our elite culture today, which dominates the universities and courts and media, is anti-children and anti-nuclear family.

Oh, I know, that is a bit of an exaggeration.  People still congratulate you on your first child, and maybe on your second.  Yet I remember a young Christian who told me that he planned to have only one child because any more would waste too many resources.  He would not then be a good Christian steward of the earth.

This young man had been fed the overpopulation myth that is still taught as gospel in most colleges and universities and media.  The fact of the matter is that the new demography crisis is underpopulation, as Eric Teetsel and Andrew T. Walker show in a recent essay at Public Discourse.  

Few industrialized countries surpass the 2.1 birthrate (average number of children per childbearing-age woman) necessary to keep populations from falling.  Not growth rate, mind you, but actual population.  Most of Europe is far below this rate, so that Italy, for example, is projected to lose 36% of its population over the next 85 years.  That will be a disaster for its social services (especially to those retired) because not enough people will be working to pay for them.

China and Japan are in worse shape.  Because of its cruel one-child policy, China now has forty million more men than women, which has triggered a social crisis for the millions of young men who cannot find wives (not to mention the millions who have been forced to have abortions).  Japan stands to lose 54% of its population in the coming decades.  Already the government is desperately trying to motivate couples to have babies.

So I call on young men and women to defy the System!  Revolt against the Establishment!  Have babies!!

Not only will they engage in a really fun social protest, but they will be saving the planet.  People are the most valuable resource, friends.

And I tell young  Christian couples who have babies that they are showing their obedience to the First Commandment.

Most are puzzled when they first hear that.  They think of the Great Love Commandment–to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

But no, I mean the first commandment in the Bible: Be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1.28).

In the Hebrew, it is poetic and fun to recite: Pru ur-vú!  (accent the last syllable).

I think this would be a good sermon, don’t you?