“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.” – Matthew 5:13 NKJV
Many of my fellow American Christians have lost their saltiness. And as a result, we have lost our power to preserve our once Christian culture. As a result, we are being thrown out and trampled under the foot of men. How have we lost our saltiness? Simply put, we have not been fruitful and multiplied (Gen. 1:28). The Lord Jesus, before He ascended into Heaven, told His disciples that all authority in Heaven and Earth had been given to Him, therefore they are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey all that Jesus commanded (Matt. 28:18-20). Two of the things that the Lord taught were that we were to be fruitful and multiply, and that parents were responsible for educating their children in the fear and nurture of the Lord. We are to have lots of children, and we are to raise them in the paideia of Christ, which simply means total enculturation of Christian teaching and living and thinking and doing.
It is not surprising that unbelievers do not think and act like Christians. Why would they? But it is quite alarming when Christians don’t think and act like Christians, and instead, think and act like the world of unbelievers. Instead of having children and giving them a Christian education, we have instead bought into the world’s lies and have opted for lives of relative comfort and ease seeking to reap the financial benefits of being a two-income household. Instead of embracing a traditional and Christian family structure, many Christian women, encouraged by their fathers and mothers and husbands, and even their Pastors, have pursued their careers over their families. So, the number of children that she chose to have, and the education that those children received, were all put on the altar of Mom’s career.
Once sent to Public Schools, our few remaining children endured 8 hours a day, 5 days a week of anti-Christian indoctrination. Marxism and Feminism are the air that is breathed there. And in these schools, they were taught that the great evils of our society are the nuclear family, the patriarchal household, and traditional Western European civilization, which of course refers to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christianity. Add into all this Pro-sexual liberation and LGBTQ ideology, and you have just created generations of students who not only hate their American and Christian heritage, but they also embrace all those practices that lower the population of our people.
In other words, we are shrinking on two fronts. Ideologically we have given over our children to be discipled by anti-Christ schools, foolishly sending 8-year-old Johnny, who ironically we have not baptized and do not allow to eat of the Lord Supper because he is not mature enough to confess faith in Christ, but we still send him off to hostile public schools to go and be a missionary. Like fools, we have sent our children to be discipled by the world, and we have been surprised to find that they lose their Christian faith when we send them off to some liberal college where the last vestiges of their faith are completely destroyed.
On the other front, we have not been having enough children to keep up with replacement rates. And when our children are old enough to start having children, they don’t. And what a surprise that anti-christian indoctrination and declining fertility rates would go hand in hand. When you teach children that the most important thing in life is finding their own self-worth in some career and that their fathers were all horrible, and the Christian faith they grew up in was a tool of oppression that was meant to prevent their sexual liberation, it is amazing how many once Christian children not only leave the faith but also refuse to reproduce. An article by Christianity Today, titled “Baby Blues: How to Face the Church’s Growing Fertility Crisis” record this phenomenon for us too. Looking at the declining numbers of babies being had in America, even among the religious, the author said this: “Here’s the most notable takeaway: Virtually 100 percent of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019 can be explained through a combination of two factors: growing numbers of religious women leaving the faith, along with declining birth rates among the nonreligious.”[1]
Why are our women leaving the faith? According to the website The New Economic Reality, which is recording the global crisis that is upon us, known as Demographic Winter, “A number of social trends of the post-war era have converged to create a perfect demographic storm. Men and women are delaying marriage, making it less likely they’ll have more than one or two children. Today in the West, almost one in two marriages ends in divorce. The children of divorce are less likely to marry and form families themselves. More married women are putting off having children for careers. After 35, it becomes progressively harder for women to conceive. The growth of cohabitation also has an impact. Cohabitation is not conducive to childbearing or childrearing. Over-arching all of these reasons is a culture of individualism that tells young adults that satisfaction comes from careers, romance, travel and “personal growth” – not from having children.”[2]
It is not that difficult to understand that our women hold the future in their hands. Or, more literally, in their bellies. Demographics is destiny. Either we are reproducing ourselves, and we are educating our women about the importance and the glories of child rearing and of having families, or we die out. Some people think it is perfectly fine if we die out, or if we give our place over to immigrants. But these are not ideas that are represented as being under the blessing of God, but instead, as being under the curse of God.
Psalm 128 teaches that having a productive and fruitful wife at home surrounded by her children at the table is the blessing of God. “Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord. He shall see his children’s children.” To have a wife who has many children and to be able to see your grandchildren, that is the blessing of the covenant. But to be barren is a shame and curse (Deut. 28:18). And to give your place over to a foreign people is also a curse of God (Deut. 28:33, 49-51).
Our Churches need to do a better job encouraging our women to be family-oriented, and not career oriented. We need to break the Feminist ideology from our churches. G.K. Chesterton astutely observed that, “Feminism is mixed up with the muddled belief that women are free when they serve their employers, but slaves when they help their husbands.” It is not oppressive to be a woman, and to bring children into the world, and to train them up in the ways of God. That is their calling. That is our future. But we have forsaken that glory and beauty for false riches, riches that will leave one empty and lonely. We need to encourage young Christian men and women, to get married early, and start families, and to make the home the center of the family’s economic life again. We need to be disenchanted with the world’s lies, and we need to help women see their lives and worth is infinitely more valuable in the home than out of it.
C.S. Lewis once remarked that “The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.” And another apocryphal quote from Lewis is worth mentioning – “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”
It is beyond time for Christians to wake up to the problems that are coming upon us and our children due to our parents and our own unbelief and faithlessness. We are at a crossroads Either we do the work of replacing ourselves with our children, and teach them to walk in his ways, and thus reap the blessings of God; or we continue to reject the word of God, choosing barrenness and infertility, walk in the ways of the world, and God replaces us with foreigners who do not know the ways of God. Our land will be inundated with more godlessness and unbelief, and our children will become strangers in their own land. This is the course we are on. May the Church of Jesus Christ choose the blessings of God, and once again be the salt of the world, by being fruitful and multiplying, and rejecting the Feminist and Marxist propaganda of the public school system.
[1] Christianity Today, “Baby Blues: How to Face the Church’s Growing Fertility Crisis”; https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/august-web-only/birth-rates-church-attendance-decline-fertility-crisis.html
[2] The New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter, http://www.theneweconomicreality.com/learn.html
Author: Pastor Michael Shover
Pastor Michael Shover is pastor at Christ the Redeemer Church in Pella
