Population Controls
Fertility and Faith by Philip Jenkins
Baylor University Press, 2020
(262 pages, $29.95, hardcover)
Beginning in the 1980s, the world entered a "Second Demographic Transition" (SDT), argues historian and sociologist Philip Jenkins. The first transition was the decline in fertility rates that followed industrialization in modern societies. In the SDT, that decline has expanded to the rest of the world. We're in an almost unprecedented demographic situation, as the rest of the world "catches up" to Europe.
The key measure is the "Total Fertility Rate" (TFR), the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime. With a TFR at 2.1 or above, a population is stable or growing; below, it begins to shrink without infusions from elsewhere. In 1950, no country in the world had a sub-replacement TFR, but by the 2010s, half the global population lived in countries with a TFR below 2.1. Three quarters of those people live in countries with TFRs below 1.8, a scandalously low rate once reserved to Scandinavia. In many countries, the demographic collapse is dramatic. Since 1970, Mexico's TFR has fallen from 7 to 2.2. Over the same period, Vietnam's TFR has gone from 6.4 to 1.9, India's from 5.5 to 2.3, and South Korea's from 4.5 to 1.0.
The trend isn't universal, and the great outlier is sub-Saharan Africa. The numbers are mind-boggling:
A hundred years ago, economically advanced and urbanized Europe confronted a lightly populated and largely nonurban Africa, but matters have since changed utterly. Africa's total population grew from just 110 million in 1900 to a billion by 2015, and with a likely increase to 2.5 billion by 2050. . . . Africans made up 7 percent of the human race in 1900, compared to over a quarter projected by 2050. Although any longer-term projections are multiply dubious, some estimates predict that by 2100 a third of all humans then alive will be African. . . . By 2050 a list of the twenty countries with the largest populations will include no fewer than six black African nations. . . . Apart from Russia no European nation will still feature on such a list of the most populous nations (122).
This expansion has occurred in the face of endemic war, violence, and disease, combined with the highest infant mortality rates of any continent.
Consequences of the SDT
Jenkins' contribution is to call attention to the religious consequences of the SDT. Early on, he cites Auguste Comte's axiom that "demography is destiny" (4). Whatever the direction of causation, he says, religious, social, economic, and political trends track alongside demographic trends. Nations with high fertility rates may have a "youth bulge," in which 15 percent or more of the population is between 15 and 24. Young countries have a lot of energy, but that may be expressed in "unrest and, sometimes, violence" (6).
When a nation's fertility falls below replacement and the population ages, it may be more stable, but it faces other strains, such as the demand for a shrinking pool of workers to care for larger and larger numbers of seniors. As Jenkins says, "An aging population and a scarcity of children echo through the whole economy. They determine how businesses market goods and services, how they build and furnish apartments or houses, how they organize public transportation" (10). "Fertilia" and "Sterilia" are "very different social worlds" (6–7).
Demographic imbalances have political and social effects, too. Societies with sub-replacement fertility import laborers from high-fertility nations to fill the gap left by never-born children. That can trigger conflict: natives may resent what appears to be a foreign invasion. Migration also has an impact on religion. The number of Muslims in Europe has increased steadily since the 1960s, with well-known results. Foreign Christian populations have also grown, both in Europe and in the Muslim world. Proximity provokes friction and violence, but it also "accelerates the process of religious cross-fertilization and globalization," as religions come into more intimate contact with each other and as migrants take their experiences in pluralistic foreign countries back home.
At the heart of the SDT is a revolution in the role of women: "The demographic revolution is above all a gender revolution" (10). Wherever women have more opportunities outside the home, wherever women's education and employment have expanded, wherever contraception and abortion have been legalized, fertility rates have declined. Career women may still have children, but they start later and have fewer children than their grandmothers. The SDT, with all its attendant social and political aftershocks, is bound up with the success of global feminism.
Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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