by Allan Carlson, Ph.D.

For half a century, the world has been subjected to a massive campaign of propaganda, aimed at the radical reduction of human fertility. Initiated principally by a small group of wealthy Americans under the banner of "population crisis," their work has been successful beyond their wildest imagining.

Reflecting this group's social policy victory, the United Nations Population Division has in recent years several times sharply reduced projections of world population for the 21^st century; one plausible scenario now has world numbers peaking at 7.8 billion in 2040, with absolute decline setting in thereafter. Indeed, although the U.N.'s "Cairo Plus Five" Conference held in New York earlier this summer called on the nations of the world to intensify their campaigns of fertility reduction and population control, the real demographic news, and danger, is population decline, around the globe.

The most extreme numbers come from Europe. French demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais describes "the demographic sunset of the west," with numbers tumbling across the old continent. A nation needs a Total Fertility Rate (or TFR: an annual estimate of completed family size per woman) of 2.1 to stand at population stability, where each generation just reproduces itself. Germany now has a figure of 1.3; Italy of 1.25; 'Catholic' Spain of 1.23. The overall figure for the European Union is only 1.5. Absolute declines in numbers have already begun in many nation-states: Germany anticipates a fall in population from 85 million today to only 58 million by 2050, with much of that remnant number quite old. Even this figure is buoyed by the high fertility of non-European "guest workers." In one recent year, 15 percent of German births came from this source, although the parents represented only six percent of the population. In neighboring Luxembourg, the equivalent figure for non-native births has reached 43 percent.

More than population counts are at stake. Under this kind of numerical implosion, the whole social framework changes: the very fact of severe fertility decline drives nations into other changes as well. British demographer David Coleman defines the landscape of this new world social order as: "birth rates chronically low, actual or incipient population decline, age-structures where the number of the elderly approach or exceed the number of children, a fragmented family pattern and a small average household size, substantial and growing non-Western racial minorities." He adds solemnly: "this combination has no historical precedent."

But this decay of the family and concomitant turn toward negative growth is not just a West European problem. Japan now reports a TFR of 1.5, driven by a sharp rise in the number of adult women who are not married. South Korea also records a TFR of 1.5, down from 6.0 in 1960 and "a record for low fertility in a developing country." The number of abortions there now equals the number of births. Iran's TFR has tumbled from 5.0 in 1991 to 3.3 only four years later. Since the fall of Communism, Russia has also gone into a demographic tailspin: infant and adult mortality rates have risen; the real TFR may be as low as 1.1. Births in 1993 totalled 1.4 million, down from 2.5 million in 1987. New data from Eastern Europe also suggests that such depopulation may be "irreversible."

Not only are national identities--even the very existence of nations--at risk. Enormous fiscal problems develop as aging populations seek to maintain social security systems premised on inter-generational solidarity and moderate population growth. Economic stagnation is also likely as the old inherit large parts of the earth. In her fictional account of an early 21^st century humanity gone totally sterile, entitled The Children of Men, English novelist P.D. James describes the weird psychology of a world without children:

I can understand how the aristocrats and great landowners with no hope of posterity leave their estates untended. We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time….[W]ithout the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defenses shored up against our ruin.

And yet, even as ever new portions of the world enter this phase of precipitous population decline, with all its woeful consequences, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, The European Community, and The United States government press relentlessly for still more population control. Like demented persons falling off a cliff, they insist on pulling the still-child-rich nations of the world along with them, rather than trying to save themselves.

How can we account for this "cognitive disconnect"? Long after depopulation should have become the central demographic worry, why do leaders of the international community continue to war against remaining pockets of robust family life?

Some answers may come if we better understand the causes of fertility decline. For a generation, demographers and economists have been debating this question, and fresh explanations have emerged. In seeking answers, it is important that we distinguish the experience of the industrialized Western world from the experience of the 'Third' or developing world. In addition, it is necessary to recognize the two distinct "fertility transitions" that have resulted in the current situation. As we shall see, such analysis also goes far toward explaining recent conflicts at UN conferences over the nature of the family, and even the peculiar international coalition in defense of the natural family that has started to emerge.

The "first" fertility transition began in Western Europe, North America, and Australia-New Zealand in the second half of the 19^th Century and reached completion in the 1930's, when TFR's fell from around 7.0 children per family to slightly over 2.0. The standard explanation for this change, given circa 1950, was that parents were pursuing a kind of "prudent modernity." In the emerging industrial environment, they sought to help their children "get ahead," and found that smaller family size would contribute to this goal. The child was still "king," and children much desired, but parents felt that family progress would be better effected by savings, self-control, and limited fertility.

Starting in 1960, though, a more complex economic explanation of fertility behavior came to the fore. Usually identified with Nobel Laureate Gary Becker of The University of Chicago, this explanation became by the early 1980's "the shared tenet of…almost everyone" who studied fertility decline. Essentially, Becker and followers--also called the 'Chicago School'--argue that fertility decline is caused by shifts in the balance of economic costs and benefits produced by child bearing. They assume that all families in all times and places have some knowledge of contraceptive techniques, and turn to the rational control of births when it is in their economic interest. During pre-modern times, characterized by family-centered household production and high death rates, families behaved rationally by bearing many children. But a new development came in this first fertility transition, as fertility fell while per-capita income rose. Becker attributes this new development to a rise in "the price of children." This so-called "price" depended, in part, "on the value of the time spent on child care by parents, typically mothers." The "foregone value" of time spent rearing children--which might have been sold instead on the emerging labor market--actually comprised over half of children's "shadow cost." Also, as infant mortality rates began to fall, parents shifted their reproductive strategy from "quantity" of children to "quality." In smaller families, they could invest more "human capital" in each child, and assume that it would survive. Phrased another way, this raised the amount of per-capita "altruism" given each child. Becker emphasizes that the first demographic transition toward low fertility was "not simply the result of 'modernization,' but itself help[ed] produce a modern economy partly by encouraging a greater investment in human capital." Put another way, the modern economy rested on or built on fertility decline.

Yet this portrait of economically rational parents making judicious fertility decisions soon ran into a problem: it failed to explain real historical changes. Charles Tilly reported that there was no historical evidence from Europe showing any relationship between declines in infant mortality and declines in fertility. Detailed investigations of fertility patterns in Germany and England between 1550 and 1850 found no signs of fertility control guided by changes in "the cost" of children. Rather, the areas studied all showed "natural fertility" throughout this period, where births to married couples reflected "the absence of deliberate birth control" and an average of six to nine children born into each family. Moreover, recent massive demographic investigations for the European Fertility Project at Princeton University and The World Fertility Survey point to the incomplete nature of 'Chicago School' explanations. Until very recent times, these studies show, contraceptive use was confined to only a very few elites; and marital fertility in the West was "constant" at a high "natural" level, despite the fact that children often represented a net economic loss to their parents.

Australian demographer John C. Caldwell was among those investigators who began to suspect that ideas, more than economic incentives, lay behind the first fertility decline. Borrowing from the 'Chicago School,' Caldwell agreed that a critical economic shift was involved: from a family-centered form of production, such as that found on a peasant farm, which welcomes children as economic assets, to a capitalist form of production, where children become an economic burden. In a "family economy," he agreed, no one has an interest in fertility control: the old draw on the earnings of the young; while young men and women gain status, and future income security, through numerous children. But he found that even after the rise of industrial capitalism, "the pyramidal family, hallowed by time and enthusiastically sanctioned by religion," could still prevail. What Caldwell called a "family morality" system could actually serve as a brake on the economic pressures toward social change; as he put it: "[t]his morality (and the concomitant high fertility) can long survive the growth of a substantial capitalist labor market, partly because it is supported by public religion and private adage." The Western world, he insists, had such a "family morality…backed by the religion and outlook of the day" until about 1900, one that held the family economy and the market economy in balance. Caldwell describes this system of mixed modes of production in a way that may sound familiar:

The family system in the West depended on a sharp division of labour: the husband worked outside the home for wages or profits…, while a wide range of [productive] activities (clothing, feeding, providing a clean and comfortable environment, child rearing) was undertaken by the wife with the help of the children (especially the daughters).

Resting on religious affirmation and a purposeful system of job and market wage preferences for fathers, this "two-tiered mode of production"--what we would call the bourgeois or Victorian home--sustained moderately high fertility long after the Becker thesis said it should have disappeared.

Yet eventually, this system did crumble. Caldwell attributes part of its failure to a "spectacular growth in capitalist" production and gadgets--from the automobile to the fast food restaurant--that overwhelmed residual home production and part to Europe's peculiar egalitarian streak, derived from the French Revolution, which opened these societies to gender-role engineering. Yet the real spoiler, he insists, was mass state education, which indoctrinated new generations against the old family morality. The new government schools, introduced in many Western nations during the late 19^th century, not only reduced the potential for child labor around the house and raised the cost for items such as children's clothing. These schools also became, for the children involved, the new focus-of-loyalty and advocate-for-the-future, displacing the family. As Caldwell explains: "[the schools] made citizens of those whose horizons had been largely confined to the family, and taught the immorality of putting family first." State schools so "destroy[ed] the corporate identity of the family," attacking parental authority in particular, and fertility tumbled. What was true for Europe, soon became true for the whole world. As Caldwell concludes: "It seems improbable--and has yet to be demonstrated--that any society can sustain stable high fertility beyond two generations of mass schooling."

Subsequent applications of Caldwell's emphasis on "mass schooling" as the trigger to fertility decline have shown positive results. In the United States, for example, the spread of state schooling is closely correlated with fertility decline in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Indeed, even in rural American school districts, each additional month of a public school year resulted in an average fertility decline of .23 children per family: the state schools literally consumed children. Other investigators have found "a strong [negative] relationship between school enrollment and fecundity," particularly at the secondary school level. Yet demographers John Cleland and Christopher Wilson are persuasive in arguing that these findings actually reflect changes in "perceptions, ideas, and aspirations," rather than in the micro-economy of the family.

Indeed, evidence from the latest demographic research points strongly toward religion as a major, and perhaps the major, influence in determining fertility. Within the religious sphere, moreover, it is teachings on and attitudes toward birth control that turn out to be determinative. This new view holds that an economic shift (such as the change from "family" to "factory" production) "is merely a powerful incentive for fertility decline;" it is "neither sufficient nor necessary" to explain the first demographic transition. Instead, the influence of religion on the beliefs of persons regarding fertility serves in practice as the critical, necessary, and sufficient variable: only change here can lead to fertility decline. As Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe summarizes, "secularization"--or "the decrease of adherence to organized forms of religion"--is both "the most powerful variable at the outset of the fertility decline" and "the one with the longest lasting effect or the highest degree of persistence." Without secularization, the evidence shows, fertility decisions would probably remain "in the realm of the sacred," whatever the economic situation. This suggests that pre-1850 fertility in Europe was "natural" and high because most Europeans were active Christians; they refused to reduce their family size, not out of ignorance, nor because of potential household economic gains, but because of their obedience to Christian teaching. As Lesthaeghe and Wilson explain:

[T]his moral system can be viewed as an excellent intellectual adaptation to, and buttress of, the traditional family mode of production in Western Europe. The intergenerational solidarity between members of the family, so necessary for the smooth operation of such familial economic units of production, was a central concern of Christian teaching. The paternal control of this unit was thoroughly legitimated by the prevailing moral code, for which the Christian churches acted as guardians.

It was the French Revolution which released a "total attack" on this system, advancing individualism, materialism, and radical egalitarianism to replace the Christian family system. One hundred years later, Protestant Christians began breaking ranks with Roman Catholics (and with their own theological founders such as Martin Luther), and started to turn fertility control over to the individual's secular conscience. This left only the Roman Catholic Church to offer a fierce resistance in Europe to this aspect of secularization in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. Pope Pius IX opened what one historian calls this "fundamentalist reaction" in the 1860's, by clarifying and solidifying church positions regarding "modernity." Leo XIII's important 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, gave the campaign greater intellectual substance/and coherence.

There are case studies from this time of the heroic Catholic defiance to the spirit of the new order, ones from which we can learn. In the Netherlands, for example, Roman Catholics constructed an entire counter-culture, designed to protect the joint demographic, economic, and theological qualities of their minority community. Showing a "strong religious elan" and spiritual "aggressiveness," the Dutch Catholics built their own Christian schools, agricultural cooperatives, labor unions, clubs, and media. They manifested "an intensified observance of specifically Roman Catholic standards of theological ethics"; they defended politically their small-scale family enterprises and farms; they built large family homes (not "homes fit only for neo-Malthusians"); and they encouraged Catholic employers to pay fathers a family wage. For nearly 75 years the effects were astonishing: in certain regions, as late as 1939, Dutch Catholic families averaged over 9 children, among the highest TFR's ever recorded, exceeded only by the Calvinist "bourgeoisie" of Geneva, Switzerland, in the 18^th Century and by the anabaptist Hutterites living on the North American prairies in the 20^th Century. The Dutch Catholic fertility figure was nearly three times the level of their already "secularized" Protestant neighbors, an astonishing differential. This 'Catholic difference' lasted in the Netherlands into the 1950's. Until then, fertility served as a sign of adherence to religious orthodoxy, a symbol of the active collaboration of church hierarchy and laity in a righteous defiance of the new spirit of the age.

In sum, the weight of the evidence shows that the "first demographic transition" in Europe--marked by the abandonment of "natural fertility"

levels of 6 to 9 children per family in favor of a TFR slightly over 2--was primarily a religious event. Secular ideas of individualism, rational calculation of economic gain, and materialism won out in most places over Christian obedience to the Genesis command, "be fruitful and multiply." In practice, these new values also displaced some level of respect for the role of God in the creation of new human life. Put another way, the compelling new evidence strongly suggests that this first episode of sharp fertility decline--the first-fertility transition--was simply a sign of societal wide religious retreat.

What about the "second demographic transition," the label given by demographers to the new wave of fertility decline into negative growth levels that set in, among Western nations, about 35 years ago? Does it, too, have a religious explanation?

To answer these questions, more background is in order. This second change actually came as a great surprise to observers, who had thought a new demographic stability had been achieved. Fertility decline had ceased in most Western nations by 1940. Indeed, after the disruptions of World War II, fertility had even climbed again. What some sociologists called "the golden age of marriage" appeared to have set in. Between 1945 and 1965, the average age of first marriage had fallen to record lows, for both men and women, and the proportion of all adults who were married reached near 95 percent in many countries, a record high. Fertility rose in the 1950's and early 1960's, creating modest "Baby Booms" in many Western nations.

But then, in what one writer properly calls "a remarkable coincidence" of timing, all the indicators of family well-being abruptly turned in these places during the very short 1963-1965 period. Fertility resumed its fall, tumbling well below the zero-growth level; a massive retreat from marriage commenced; and Western societies seemed to lose all sense of inherited familial order. Dutch demographer Dirk van de Kaa has described the phenomenon as involving four transformations:

• A shift from the golden age of marriage to the dawn of the age of cohabitation, where marriage is increasingly discarded in favor of informal sexual and living arrangements;

• A shift from the era of the king-child with parents to that of the king-adult pair with one--and usually only one--child;

• A shift from preventive contraception, designed to benefit the favored early children, to self-fulfilling contraception, designed to please the parents; and

• A shift from a uniform family system of a married couple with children to pluralistic families and households, including the rapid growth of single-parent families.

How do demographers explain these changes? All agree that analysts seriously misread developments in the 1945-65 era. Caldwell suggests that the "Baby Booms" found in Europe, North America, and Australia were "not real." Rather, they were the compound effect of "earlier and more nearly universal marriages in a period of imperfect contraception" and some catching up on births deferred by economic depression in the 1930's and by war in the 1940's. Van de Kaa agrees that the Baby Boom was a one time event, brought on by earlier marriages, and a marked acceleration in first and second births. That third and fourth births in families were still in decline in most places was not immediately apparent. Michael Murphy offers a more sobering analysis, suggesting that the "Baby Boom" and the "golden age of marriage" were in fact logical preludes to the seemingly permanent "baby bust," all being products of the mid-century sexual revolution. As he writes:

…the whole post-war period forms a more coherent pattern than is often recognized. The second demographic transition is initially associated with increased numbers of births as young people become sexually active at younger ages, both inside and outside of marriage: age at marriage fell and the proportions who married rose. Fertility tends to rise, in part because there is not full awareness of, and access to, efficient contraception. [But] in time, this situation reverses.

The "Chicago School" theorists emphasize the role of women's wages in this change, arguing that at "almost every age and birth order, higher net women's hourly earnings [compared to men's] reduce the likelihood of birth." Equal Pay Laws adopted in the 1960's and early '70's, they suggest, disrupted systems where higher net wages for men encouraged fertility. Researchers looking at Japan trace that nation's sharp fertility decline to the increase in the proportion of married women who were employed, from 13 percent in 1963 to 42 percent in 1991, a change labeled "the most rapid increase on record in economically advanced nations." Consistent with this thesis, the "wage gap" between Japanese women and men closed from 70 percent to 84 percent over the same years, reflecting the relative rise in women's pay. Economists looking at Swedish data from the early 1980's found that higher wages for women substantially reduced the all-important number of third births, while higher wages for men substantially increased the proportion of women having a third birth. With the overall shift in relative wages there in favor of women, the number of third births had fallen sharply. The "Chicago School" also shows how state-provided welfare benefits can disrupt the natural economic gains of marriage. So can easier divorce, since women will only commit to more children and housework, and forego career advancement, if they are reasonably certain that their households will not dissolve. Ermish shows that married mothers who are employed after giving birth are almost twice-as-likely to divorce as new mothers who do not work after bearing a child. Indeed, "Chicago School" analysis suggests that such processes begin to feed on themselves. As Ermisch explains:

Thus, having fewer children and having them later in one's life suggests a tendency for the expected gains from marriage cooperation to decline. This suggests that a fall in fertility will [in turn] increase divorce rates and reduce marriage rates."

But among some analysts, suspicion remains that "women's employment" may be more symptom or consequence of the second demographic transition, than cause. Murphy suggests that the "Chicago School" simply cuts out the "middle level" explanations in order to link fertility decline to "remote determinants," without showing how these actually work.

The very pervasiveness of this "second" transition may point to better explanations. Coleman notes that remaining pockets of high fertility in Europe--such as the rural urSwiss regions of Switzerland--all disappeared after 1965. So did pockets of higher "Catholic fertility" still to be found in Spain and Portugal. Van de Kaa reports that 97 percent of 21-year-old Danish women now report having had pre-marital sex, essentially marking the full collapse there of the old sexual ethic. Lesthaeghe and Meekers show that only 20 percent of all European Community citizens above age 18 have a meaningful link to organized religion; among young adults, the figure is lower still. Ronald Inglehart cites the sharp decline in votes for identifiably religious political parties in Europe after 1963 as a sign of what he calls "the silent revolution" in European values.

Coleman concludes that ideas and values "may be more important that had been thought" in explaining the second demographic transition. Lesthaeghe is more blunt. Recent changes in family formation and marital fertility, he says, are nothing new. They merely continue the "long-term shift in the Western ideational system" away from the values affirmed by Christian teaching (specifically "responsibility, sacrifice, altruism, and sanctity of long-term commitments") and toward a militant "secular individualism" focused on the desires of the self. And so, secularization or the retreat from religion emerges again as the key variable in understanding this second demographic change.

It is important to note that the values of the new secular order, despite the rhetoric, do not in fact center on "freedom" and "choice." Rather, the evidence suggests that those are transitional arguments, masking a new and quite negative view of children. Belgian researchers point to signs that European youth "appear to be extending non-conformism with respect to abortion, divorce, etc., to parenthood as well," agreeing in large majorities with statements such as "children need only one parent" and "children are no longer needed for personal fulfillment." Even those who choose to parent now do so "to satisfy their private needs," rather than to meet religious, family, or communal obligations. The new "tolerance" of alternate lifestyles at times comes near to excluding parenthood even as an option. Van de Kaa notes the paradox that it was the arrival of "perfect" contraception--in the mode of the birth control pill--in 1964-65 which, instead of bringing "wanted" children within marriage, produced couples who could live outside of marriage "without fear of unwanted pregnancy and forced marriage" and perhaps subsequently make a "self-fulfilling choice" to bear a child. Historian Philippe Aries, author of the classic volume Centuries of Childhood, sees "a new epoch, one in which the child occupies a smaller place, to say the least." Between 1450 and 1900, he notes, the Europeans had expanded the place of the child in their civilization. Levels of care improved noticeably, and the period of childhood became something precious. The Europeans even created "the child king," placing children at the center of children's lives. Looking near our century's end at a civilization with almost universal pre-marital sex, ubiquitous contraception, legal abortion, and record-low fertility, Aries concludes: "In like manner, [the child's] role is changing today, before our very eyes. It is [now] diminishing."

It is true that, for a brief time in the early 1990's, there was optimism among some European experts that Sweden had found an easy way out of the looming demographic disaster. Swedish fertility appeared to rise again after 1983, and by 1990 had reached a TFR of 2.09, just shy of the "replacement" level. Despite Sweden's extraordinary commitment to the full market employment of all women, including most particularly mothers, it was believed that generous family welfare benefits--public daycare, paid parental leave, parental rights to part-time work, and child allowances--had met the challenge. Perhaps this indicated "what lies ahead for other populations," suggested one analyst hopefully.

But optimism soon vanished, as Sweden's TFR fell back to 1.6 by the mid-1990's. It turned out that policy manipulations and new money had managed to affect primarily the timing of births, which artificially buoyed the TFR for a time. In truth, the new social order's values of "individualism and pluralism" actually promised to overwhelm the ideal of inter-generational solidarity, on which the Swedish welfare-state itself had been built. Indeed, there was no real evidence that European-style child allowances or related measures had any positive fertility effect, in the face of growing secular individualism. Even the provision of free day care to working mothers was proving counter-productive, since this meant in practice the hiring of still more women, which in turn raised the aggregate "cost" of children and so reduced overall fertility. Demographer Heather Joshi caught the ultimate futility in all this by noting the irony that so-called "woman-friendly policies" like day care were being advocated in Europe to increase fertility, while the very same policies were being advanced in the Third World to decrease fertility.

So the real issue behind the second demographic transition, just as for the first, has been religion: the contest between vital faith that welcomes children and a secular individualism that does not want them. This may explain why the "population control campaign" cannot stop, even though it has already gained the original "zero-growth" ambitions; among the campaign's leaders, and in the new order they defend, even a stable world population contains too many children.

When we turn to The Developing World, we see the two demographic transitions being imposed on native peoples by self-appointed "Westernizers." The process actually began in the late nineteenth century, as colonial administrators under the influence of Malthusian ideas set out to suppress fertility in the Indian Raj, and elsewhere in Asia and Africa. The Protestant churches, already weakening in their affirmation of fertility and in their rejection of contraception, joined in during the early 20^th century. For somewhat plausible reasons, these missionaries understood the term "to Christianize" also to mean "to Westernize." Even so, they sometimes contributed to unnecessary assaults on the existing "family moralities" of the subject peoples.

From his detailed investigations in Africa, Caldwell shows how the introduction of Western schooling had particularly injurious consequences in colonial areas. The work of these institutions in practice rested "on the destruction of traditional society." Natives brought into the colonial administration were taught as well that nation-building and future prosperity depended on the intentional breaking apart of "village traditions and life" and "the family moralities" that they protected and nurtured.

Above all, Caldwell emphasizes that "the attack on family morality begins with, or is paralleled by, an attack on the theology that supports and justifies it." He notes that this fact "is obvious and widely felt in Muslim societies." He quotes an imam from southern Thailand, who pointed to a Western school and explained: "education [there] made a man unreligious;… [Western] Civilization is anti religious."

Where the Christians of 1899 would not have agreed, the more sobered and marginalized Christians of 1999 just might. The dominant cultural and political leaders of Western Civilization threw off any remaining veneer of Christianity several decades ago: the year 1965, as van de Kaa hints, might just mark 'The Great Divide' here as well. As the value-changes described in this paper show, the new global civilization of today, born in the West, is militantly secular, ferociously anti-traditional, fundamentally hostile to autonomous families, the enemy of robust marital fertility, and a threat to the newly conceived child everywhere…including the new Christian child.

This is, of course, a difficult truth to face. Not so long ago, "the Christian family, both in terms of economic vitality and…cultural continuity," was widely regarded as "the cornerstone of Western civilization." Except among scattered remnants, here and there, this is no longer so. The West's political and popular cultures now belong, with only a few exceptions, to the "new order" architects of the post-child and post-family world. The familial remnants in the West--such as The Vatican and its loyal adherents, a handful of Latin American nations with openly Christian leaders, separatist agrarian communities like the Amish, the Mormons in the inter-mountain American West, Orthodox and Hassidic Jews, families with their children in strong religious schools, and religiously motivated home schoolers--these now engage in a sometimes desperate rear guard defense of their respective "family moralities."

But there are other holdouts from the new global culture of the "diminished child." Caldwell himself notes "the Muslim countries, where religion supports family role segmentation," and "the tropical African family system" which retains a "strong cultural emphasis on what the young owe the old." As Cleland and Wilson explain:

It is surely no coincidence that in those parts of the world that have withstood the [secular] onslaught by design (e.g., much of the Islamic world), by the strength of indigenous culture and its incompatability with Western values (e.g., the Indian sub-continent), or by relative isolation (e.g. Africa), fertility transition has yet to occur, or has only a tenuous foothold.

This is how we can understand recent coalition-building at UN conferences in Cairo, Beijing, and Istanbul. In these places, the remnants of the old Christian West found themselves in unexpected alliance with Islamic and African countries, in the defense of children and families from the onslaughts of the new secular order. Profound differences in theology and background gave way, at least for a time, to a concentration on what they shared in common, and on what they all stood to lose.

It is important to remember that the advocates of "secular individualism" and of the "diminished child, post-family" order are well aware of the demographic findings noted in this paper. They read the demographic journals, too. They look for the levers that will engineer fertility decline and result in fewer children. They understand, all too well, that the values behind the second demographic transition face only one real opponent: vital religious faith. They know that if religion can be defeated, marginalized, or "converted" to their side, they will win.

And, as demographic numbers from the late 1990's suggest, the advocates for the new order are near that victory. It is not hysterics, but objective observation, to suggest that the defenders of those "family moralities" that still hallow marriage and still welcome children have little time left, perhaps a decade or two, before the virulent secular individualism of the new so-called "Western" order completes its work.

So what should religiously-guided family people do? Lessons drawn from the past suggest that they should:

1. defend their respective orthodoxies, without any compromise with secular modernity;

2. build "parallel cultural structures" such as schools, unions, clubs, small businesses, and media outlets, to minimize contact with the new "Westernizing" order;

3. develop attitudes of righteous, aggressive defiance before the architects of the new order, much like the Dutch Catholics of the 1920's;

4. and build practical alliances with the other systems of "family morality" that still survive.

This last recommendation is where The World Congress of Families II seeks to play a role. We hope to rally representatives of authentic "family moralites" from around the globe, in common affirmation of the natural family, and in its common defense. For we can learn here from the metaphorical warning given by America's Ben Franklin to his often quarrelsome fellow patriots, at the beginning of the American Revolution. "My friends," he said, "we must hang together; for otherwise, we shall all surely hang separately."