If a society places a low value on children, pretty soon there will not be enough of them. As a friend of mine likes to say, “That’s not magic, it’s just math.”
Only 3 percent of the world’s population currently lives in a country whose birth rate isn’t declining. According to a 2020 BBC report, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Thailand, and South Korea will lose half their populations by the end of this century. Within 75 years, virtually every country on earth will have a shrinking population. Those in the West will be among the first and fastest declining.
You may know that the United States has a “poet laureate” named Ada Limón. (She was actually featured in last night’s Jeopardy! Masters show.) But did you know that we also have our first “drag laureate”?
"Hi, my name is Tim Keller." Those few words would begin a seven-year friendship between me and Tim.
On this day in A.D. 337, Emperor Constantine died. Many Christians think that Constantine was perhaps the worst thing to happen to the Church. They believe he made Christianity the imperial religion, thus leading the Church to compromise with pagan culture, marrying it to state power, and derailing the spread of the Gospel. The Church, they argue, was better off as a persecuted minority. After all, didn’t the Church father Tertullian tell us that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church?
If we embrace our suffering as an opportunity to trust Christ with our pain and serve others in theirs, “the salvific meaning of suffering” will be revealed to us. We will testify with Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7). We will experience an intimacy with our Lord and our fellow sufferers unavailable to others.
And when our journey leads us from this world to the next, we can say what Tim Keller told his family before his homegoing: “I’m ready to see Jesus. I can’t wait to see Jesus. Send me home.” The old hymn was right: “The way of the cross leads home.” What cross is yours today?
Advocates of Christian nationalism do often accurately describe the problems Western societies face: protecting the beauties of tradition and transcendence and the vital importance of allowing our faith to influence public life. They are also right about the shortsightedness of Christians who are allergic to any cultural application of Christianity. We are not to be of the world, but we’re certainly to be in it.
Partly right can still be partly wrong. The best aspects of Christian nationalism are, in fact, the common inheritance of Christian theology and conservative ideals, that of Edmund Burke, Abraham Kuyper, Winston Churchill, and William Wilberforce. The innovations of Christian nationalism, on the other hand, should give us pause.
From the moment the Dodgers chose to honor a group that so overtly dishonors core Christian principles and, more explicitly, the Catholic expression of those principles, they were headed down a difficult path. That they made the correct decision to turn back still opened them up to criticism and derision from those who believe that the Sisters deserved their place of honor in the Dodgers Pride Night event.
The same principle applies to each of us as well.
According to the state of Wisonsin, because Catholic Charities is engaged in purely charitable activities—giving to the poor, caring for the needy, and looking out for the downtrodden—they cannot claim a religious exemption. The state claims that activities like praying and preaching are religious and that an entity must be engaged primarily in those types of activities to be considered religious. Their contention is both nonsensical, given the history of religious charity, and dangerous, given what it says about government opinions regarding the place of religion in society.
As we noted yesterday, God’s judgment against our sins is certain. But sins also bring their own consequences. The “just penalty” for them “always pursues” those who commit them.
Infidelity destroys marriages; pornography damages the brains of those who consume it. When we eat “forbidden fruit,” its inherent poison sickens us. You can mark it down as an inexorable law of the universe: sin “always pursues the transgression of the unrighteous.”
