The (In)Scrutable Observer

Courtesy of Al Mohler, I've discovered an article titled The Family Factor by Allan Carlson of the Howard Center of Rockford, Illinois. (This makes him my near-neighbor--my home in Belvidere is a mere fifteen-minute drive from Rockford.) In this article, Mr. Carlson covers much the same ground I covered not long ago regarding what I dubbed the "power of multiplication" wielded by people who subscribe to traditional family values. He explains how Europe, which has largely given up on the traditional family, is dying a demographic death, whereas the USA is seeing an increase in births amongst those who hold to family-friendly religions. He writes:

The best explanation for America’s greater fecundity—this openness to children—is the higher degree of religious identification and behavior shown by Americans. Forty-five percent of Americans in the year 2000 reported attending religious services during the previous week; in Europe, only about ten percent did. And believers usually do have more babies. Alas, outside of recent Hispanic immigrants, overall Catholic numbers today are not impressive, but “white fundamentalist Protestants” who attend church weekly show a fertility rate 27 percent above the national average, and the fertility rate of active American Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, is about double the national average.

It is interesting to consider the consequences of disobeying vs. obeying one of the first of God's commandments: to be fruitful and multiply in order to populate the earth. The eventual demise of today's seemingly omnipotent and omnipresent secularism and hedonism is inevitable as its proponents meet their eventual end, without offspring and thus without a legacy.