The very first command God gives to the first humans is to be fruitful and multiply. If there aren’t people, then there are no commandments and no wisdom, for who would be there to contemplate or to act? But with ongoing human life, everything else follows in time — so long as people continue to invest in those who will follow them.
Our generation is doing the opposite — ringing up debt that will saddle those who come after us.
If they come after us.
For it has been evident for some time that humankind around the world has decided that it will observe the commandment about being fruitful and multiplying about as much as any of the other commandments — sporadically, as it may please us.
Opposing this suicidal trend is the deepest reason for my own political conservatism.
We have known for some time that the replacement rate had been dropping. In 2011, David Goldman in his How Civilizations Die called our attention to the sharp drop in the birthrate around the globe, something he called a path of willed self-extinction. Things have only gotten worse since then. In 1960, the American birthrate was 3.65 per couple; by 2000, it was 2.06; and by 2020, it was 1.64. A small spike during COVID was only a brief respite; the birth rate continues downwards. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: The American People Know the Real Hamas)
A recent article in the Free Press suggests an underlying cause. In her article this week, Rikki Schlott makes the case that as men trend increasingly rightwards and women increasingly towards the left, establishing a relationship between them becomes increasingly difficult and rare.
Why should that be so? It wasn’t terribly uncommon in America fifty years ago for husband and wife to have political differences. By and large, the structures of our communal life — our schools, our houses of worship, our service clubs, and our bowling league, and our bridge clubs embraced people of both parties and a range of political opinions. There was a broad consensus that was the atmosphere of the country. We thrived within a large, civil consensus, and believed that it was capable of working through life’s challenges successfully together.
Yes, it had its limits. But we accepted the need for rebellion, even as we tried to temper its rough edges. We knew we needed its enlivening energy and we made places for it. We had stable forms capable of constructively channeling an abundance of life energy. We believed we could grow and thrive, changing but always coherent.
The greatest success was in being a religious land without religious coercion. Although religions make special claims on people, setting boundaries on behavior, on beliefs, and even on acceptable partners for marriage, the experience of the millennia embodied in our religions tempers the fanaticism that into which faith claims have been known to lapse. American religious freedom meant that our religious communities had to renounce the favorite ploy of the fanatic — using the power of the state to force doctrinal conformity.
Separating religion and state is not something absolute. We are both religious and political beings, for religion means simply our addressing of the deepest issues of life, the place from which first principles and axioms spring, and politics is how we negotiate together the practical life of the polis, our lives together. Political freedom requires our own inner commitment, that which religion teaches and reinforces — that we must govern ourselves if we wish to be free of needing a tyrant to enforce order.
The religious wars of Europe, and in particular, the bloody struggles over religion during the English Civil War, were a caution to the American Founders. The political differences of Charles I and the Parliament did not rise to out-and-out war until the struggle was successfully framed as religious. And so it was fought — a war between the supporters of the episcopate on the King’s side, and an alliance of Scottish Presbyterians and English Puritans on the other. The man who won the war, Oliver Cromwell, constantly framed the political and even military issues in fiery religious language. Here he writes in a letter about his triumph at the battle of Marston Moor:
Truly England and the Church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord, in this great Victory given unto us, such as the like never was since this War began. It had all the evidences of an absolute Victory obtained by the Lord’s blessing upon the Godly Party principally. We never charged but we routed the enemy. The Left Wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince’s horse. God made them as stubble to our swords.
His “Godly Party” won the war and established what amounted to a military dictatorship for more than a decade. Renouncing tyranny, the American Founders rejected the idea that our own politics should settle whose is the Godly Party. Rather, we should place religion beyond the reach of politics, so that all would give the state their assent as citizens and their practical duty, to paraphrase part of Washington’s reassuring reply to the Jewish community of Newport in 1790. (READ MORE: The Story of Oct. 7 Is the Same as the Story of Dec. 7)
But in America in the early 21st century, politics has again entwined itself in religion. Cultural Marxism holds sway over a large swath of America, and over one of its great political parties. Like all Marxism, it is a religion. Its faith is that its politics embody the ultimate truth, and whereas all the traditional religions are merely exploitative power-grabbers, hiding their motives and manipulating their followers with untrue and outdated narratives. They believe that tolerance and freedom of religion and of expression are negative, as there is no need to debate the truth which is theirs entirely. Their revolutionary politics believes our First Amendment freedoms are harmful and should be eliminated.
Just as traditional religions in their heydays usually insisted and always preferred that their followers marry only within their community, the new religion of the cultural Marxists insists as well on no out-marrying. How could there be any true relationship of any sort between the awakened people of the light and the oppressors, i.e., everyone who is not similarly awakened? And if that is true of relationships in general, how much the more so of intimate relationships.
The effect of that religious requirement of the cultural Marxism that has a grip on the young’s education fans out widely. The NY Post reports of a recent poll by a Bay Area research firm, Change, that showed “that 55% of women found it a turnoff for a partner to listen to ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ while 53% said it was offputting for a love interest to refuse to see Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster ‘Barbie.’” As political differences increase between the sexes, and as politics tries to become religion, we can see the power of this driver increasing in our birthrate stats.
As a religion, Marxism in general is not family friendly. In the largest Communist country, the South China Post reports that “China posts record-low birth rate despite government push for babies.” In America, the higher the level of education and power, the lower the birth rate. Only natural when one feels part of an elite with more wisdom than the traditional institutions and inherited culture of the poor idiots over whom the elite have the right to rule with no accountability and less limitation. (READ MORE: Complicit Media Wants Israel to Spare the Children)
In the section of the Torah read this week in Jewish synagogues around the world, God tells Moses that the people should “make Me a Sanctuary and I will dwell in them.” The text long ago drew attention — shouldn’t it have said “I will dwell in it,” in that Sanctuary they are to build.
But no. The Sanctuary and all outer structures exist for the purpose of Godliness within each one of us. That enables us to be right with each other. That enables us to build relationships, which enable us to build families, build societies, and build nations and a community of nations.
Without it, we don’t even get to square one. With no relation to that which transcends us, we die with no one to follow us and carry on the shared vision. We perish in our isolation, in our chosen extinction on the altar of our own woke perfection.
The transforming of politics into religious war is self-immolation. Opposing this suicidal trend is the deepest reason for my own political conservatism. We must conserve the place of religion in society and we must refuse to let politics swallow it up. We dedicate our lives to the Oneness that makes possible the bridging of human differences in loving relationships and gladly bring new life into the world.
