Atheists Lack Demographic Hope: Christians Are and Should Be Different

Editor’s Note: We apologize for the failure of the next two parts of the originally scheduled review essay to post over the last two days. We had some technical difficulties with their posting. We will run the full three-part review series again at a later date.

It is a well-known demographic reality that, considered as a whole identity group, those who do not believe in God eschew having children.¹ I remember perusing some Canadian fertility statistics from Cardus while visiting relatives in Canada a few years back, and I found it completely unsurprising that atheists had the fewest children and the highly religious had the most children—whether “religious” was determined by simple self-identification or frequency of religious service attendance.

As Philip Jenkins’ 2020 book, Fertility and Faith, revealed, the rest of the world is the same.² The most atheistic countries have below-replacement fertility (see Table 1 for the most recent statistics). In fact, with the exceptions of Mongolia (2.59), these countries are not even close to the replacement rate of 2.1. Just like Scar in The Lion King, atheism is associated with a culture of declining life.

Table 1. Countries with the  Percentage of Atheists above 25% and Fertility Rates

In contrast, here are the fertility rates of the countries with the highest percentage of belief in God, based on the 63 countries measured in the World Values Survey

Here, we find all but three of the countries above the second-highest atheistic country (Vietnam 1.88)—some measurably so (e.g., Nigeria at 4.3 and Ethiopia at 3.81). In addition, one of the countries below 1.88, Iran, is under an extreme form of religious authoritarianism.

Why?

The causes and consequences of low fertility relate to numerous factors,⁷ so the reasons for this correlation are, of course, just as complex. Yet, the charts above, as well as within-country surveys of parents ‘ views about children and religious beliefs, reveal that the atheist-low fertility rate correlation is no accident. As Lyman Stone noted a few years ago, “virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019 can be explained through a combination of a growing number of religious women converting to irreligion, and declining birth rates among the nonreligious.”

What I would like to see, but I have not yet found, is a study that examines the relationship, not only between a particular identity group’s religious identity or religious service attendance, but also the relationship between a group’s general view of hope and fertility. I would hypothesize that it is one major virtue that one finds less among non-theists, and that it also influences fertility. If you do not have a particular kind of theistic-based hope for the future, I suspect you are less likely to bring children into the world.

I saw this reality play out when I lived in Russia, where enforced atheism led to a plague of hopelessness. It was and still is a culture without hope, as evidenced by the cynical joke culture that exists. Thus, one local joke was that if you find a family with more than one child, they are either Baptist, Pentecostal, or Muslim. The religious believers somehow found hope amidst cultural despair to have more than one child. The nonreligious have less hope and turn to other options. For instance, Russian men are considered to have the highest rate of alcohol use disorders in the world (16.29%), with their women #2 among women (2.58%).

That is not to say that Western European countries outside of post-communist ones are doing significantly better. Western European countries are all declining in fertility and population. Secularization and a radical environmentalism that critiques the “waste” produced by having more children,⁸ likely combine to squeeze away hope.

Christian Hope and Children

Christianity can provide a counter-cultural hope. Christian hope is known as a Christian theological virtue for good reason. Most common measures of hope used in positive psychology assess little more than self-belief or optimism regarding reaching certain ends.⁹ When undertaking a recent study of hope, my colleagues and I looked for a measure of hope that we thought reflected a Christian perspective in which hope is directed toward God. We could not find one.

I also do not think any kind of Christian hope is the answer. Certain theological traditions appear unable to supply the robust form of hope that contributes to higher fertility rates. For example, every majority Eastern Orthodox country has a below-replacement-level fertility rate. Moreover, one simply cannot blame this problem on a communist past. Greece, for example, has a 1.34 fertility rate even though 91.7% of the population believes in God. It also has the highest percentage of population decline in the world of any country over a million people (-1.77%). There are not many Big Fat Greek families in Greece. I do not find that surprising. Eastern Orthodox theology tends to focus so much on suffering that this emphasis can overshadow a robust version of Christian hope.

When it comes to how we view children, theological beliefs matter (as do other factors, of course). Yet, as I wrote in an earlier blog post:

When asked, almost all of my students have not thought theologically about the decision to have children or even about the number. It’s largely a lifestyle choice or personal preference for them, mixed with financial or health risk considerations. This pragmatic approach to what throughout the Bible is one of life’s biggest blessings seems incredibly odd for Christian students, many of whom are educated in Christian universities, where every square inch of life is supposedly corum Deo.

So, what kind of Christian hope matters?

One must have enough hope to believe that bringing numerous children into the world is something for which God designed us and something in which God delights. In his fascinating history of the interpretation of Gen. 1:28, Jeremy Cohen summarizes the general Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions in this way,  “Acknowledging the wondrous quality of reproduction, Gen. 1:28a views human procreation as a blessing and thereby bequeaths the divine image to posterity even prior to the expulsion from Eden, not merely as a response to the curses that accompanied the fall.”¹⁰

Today, it appears our worldwide culture no longer views procreation as a blessing to be unleashed but a possibility to be mitigated against, except for only the right circumstances. We certainly are far from Martin Luther’s view, “For truly in all nature there was no activity more excellent and more admirable than procreation. After the proclamation of the name of God, it is the most important activity Adam and Eve in the state of innocence could carry on, as free from sin in doing this as they were in praising God.”¹¹

I would not necessarily subscribe to all of Luther’s views here, as I would add that the stewardship of God’s creation, which God bestowed upon humans in Genesis 1:28, was also an excellent and admirable activity. However, Luther’s view is a far cry from where our culture is today.

More than ever, we must be able to hope and believe that children are a blessing from the Lord (a common theme throughout Scripture) and are God’s designed way of bringing the redemptive message of the Kingdom. The more unique image bearers of God that exist in the world, the more the light of God can shine throughout the world. We must remember how God works in unique ways through the weak—including infants and children. As Psalms 8:2 reminds us:

Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.

To hear and embrace the praise of children and infants, we need to have them.

1. Philip Jenkins, Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions (Baylor University Press, 2020).
2. Jenkins, Fertility and Faith.
3. World Values Survey, 2017-2022, file:///C:/Users/Perry_Glanzer/Downloads/F00010763-WVS_Results_By_Country_2017-2022_v6.0.0.pdf
4. United Nations, World Population Prospects, https://population.un.org/wpp/
5. World Values Survey, 2017-2022,file:///C:/Users/Perry_Glanzer/Downloads/F00010763-WVS_Results_By_Country_2017-2022_v6.0.0.pdf
6. United Nations, World Population Prospects, https://population.un.org/wpp/
7. Eric Kaufmann and W. Bradford Wilcox,. Whither the Child?: Causes and Consequences of Low Fertility (Routledge, 2013). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315631134.
8. Kirsti M Jylhä, Martin Kolk, and Malcolm Fairbrother. “Attitudes towards Childbearing, Population, and the Environment: Prevalence, Correlates, and Connections with Fertility Outcomes in Sweden.” Population and Environment 47, no. 3 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-025-00503-9.
9. For two common examples, see C.R. Snyder, Cheri Harris, John R Anderson, Sharon A Holleran, Lori M Irving, Sandra T Sigmon, Lauren Yoshinobu, June Gibb, Charyle Langelle, and Pat Harney. “The Will and the Ways: Development and Validation of an Individual-Differences Measure of Hope.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 4 (1991): 570–85. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.4.570;  C.R. Snyder, Susie C Sympson, Florence C Ybasco, Tyrone F Borders, Michael A Babyak, and Raymond L Higgins. “Development and Validation of the State Hope Scale.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70, no. 2 (1996): 321–35. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.2.321.
10. Jeremy Cohen, Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It : The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 14.

11. Martin Luther, Vorlesungen uber 1. Mose, ad 2:18, in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar, r 883-present), 42:89; tr. in Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (St. Louis, 1955-86), 1:117-18.