In a world that prizes autonomy and convenience, the church can model a different way—a way of sacrificial love, covenantal commitment, and the beauty of generational faithfulness. It’s true the “nones” are on the rise in the West, but globally, Pew Research Forum predicts “secular” people in 2060 will make up a smaller percentage of the world’s population than they do today, mainly because of demographic trends. Eric Kaufmann’s book ‘Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?’ claims the future will belong not to secular elites but to grassroots communities marked by deep faith.

Not since the 1300s, when the world’s population imploded due to the bubonic plague, have we faced a demographic downsizing of the magnitude projected for the century ahead. Many observers predict the global population will peak in the coming decades, with estimates ranging from 2053 to the late 2070s or 2080s, before entering a period of decline.

Wait a minute! you may be thinking. Wasn’t it just 50 years ago that experts warned about overpopulation? And don’t we hear constant talk of the world’s population boom? Yes, but as Peter Zeihan explains in The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, today’s population swell is partly due to increasing life spans.

Lower mortality increases the population to such a degree that it overwhelms any impact from a decline in birth rates . . . but only for a few decades. Eventually gains in longevity max out, leaving a country a greater population, but with few children. Yesterday’s few children leads to today’s few young workers leads to tomorrow’s few mature workers. And now, at long last, tomorrow has arrived.

The Age of Depopulation

Nicholas Eberstadt’s recent essay for Foreign Affairs, “The Age of Depopulation,” chronicles the startling collapse in global fertility rates, which have fallen to half what they were in the 1960s. “More and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation,” he writes. East Asia, for instance, “tipped into depopulation in 2021,” while Latin America and parts of the Middle East now face subreplacement fertility rates also. Even countries once thought immune due to cultural or religious traditions, such as Iran and Turkey, are on a similar trajectory. Unless you live in sub-Saharan Africa, you likely reside in a country with subreplacement fertility—a trend accelerating in recent years.

What’s behind this decline in childbearing? Eberstadt points to a “revolution in family formation.” Across the globe, we see “the ‘flight from marriage,’ with people getting married at later ages or not at all; the spread of nonmarital cohabitation . . . and the increase in homes in which one person lives independently—in other words, alone.” This seismic cultural shift means fewer children and smaller, more fragile families.

As families wither, the desire for autonomy, self-actualization, and convenience rises. In this atmosphere, children are “quintessentially inconvenient” and big families become cultural outliers. It’s true that religious belief can stem the tide by encouraging marriage and celebrating children, but only up to a point, because family formation and religious participation are intertwined in counterintuitive ways. (See Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God for the provocative thesis that secularism is a result of family breakdown, not always its cause.)

The Age of the Aged

The world’s depopulation will unleash a cascade of social consequences. The collapse of fertility means, according to Nicholas Eberstadt, “fewer workers, savers, taxpayers, renters, home buyers, entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors . . . and voters.” What’s more, by 2050, there will be more people over the age of 80 than children in some countries. He writes,

A depopulating world will be an aging one.

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